


Made of Gold

by orphan_account



Category: AFI
Genre: Angst, Burials Era, Davey's harem, Depression, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, New Year's Eve, Pornography, Sex Addiction, implied eating disorders/compulsive exercise, mentions of Zooey/Hunter, the party decays
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-24
Updated: 2015-01-24
Packaged: 2018-03-08 22:46:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 16
Words: 25,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3226325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the last two months of 2013</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ready for inspection

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this in November, and thought it was going to be a Burials era Javey about Davey, Hunter, and sex addiction. It turned into this study on last years pop singles, and a lot of other things. I don't know. It's not fun at all. Just fyi it contains graphic het, mentions of ED/weight loss talk, and some cross generational stuff.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it begins! I didn't put a self harm warning on this story because it doesn't contain explicit self harm, but it does discuss subjects like EDs, pathological exercise, and overall self-destructive tendencies, just so everyone is aware. On a different note, can someone pat me on the back for writing a hunvey that isn't a oneshot?

Winter comes sudden and heavy, a cruel crispness to the air stinging Davey’s lungs as he sucks in breaths and releases them, twisting shapes of white from his chapped, drawn lips. He’s running outdoors, something he rarely does. He hates not being able to monitor every living cell of his progress, his heart rate and his burnt calories and his miles per hour. He hates not knowing the details of his own shame, instead left guessing every time his shoes strike icy pavement and his mouth tastes exhaust and his eyes water against the wind, But the gym is closed for his least favorite holiday. Which, this year at least, is also Jade’s fortieth birthday. 

Davey is too stunned that they are both still alive to feel anything beyond that, any of the parade of furies and regrets he expected to feel when Jade turned forty. His heart beats hard inside his ribs, propelling his blood though his veins, propelling him down the streets of his childhood, empty save for the memories he still holds of so desperately wanting to escape them, the hungry longing for wider streets, highways and traffic lights and intersections loud and alive with promise. 

Running in a gym is like meditation for Davey. He doesn’t have to think of anything but the numbers steadily climbing in front of him, he doesn’t have to think of anything but how purely and perfectly he loathes his flesh. He can watch his collarbone collect perspiration like the holy grail in the dead TV screen in front of him, he can watch his own throat bob over thick, desperate breaths and think nothing but _More. One more. Two more maybe. A half more. A quarter more. One more. More. More_ as he runs in place, going nowhere. Over the years, Davey has successfully made himself into a machine, and he never feels more cleanly, efficiently mechanized than when he’s running at the gym. 

It is so strange and different to be outside that it almost feels like he’s not running. Like he’s committing some other act of self-made self-destruction, something messy, human. He doesn’t like it. He imagines Jade’s first Thanksgiving, and wonders if it fell on his first birthday, forty years ago when Davey was not yet imagined. Then he wonders why he’s thinking that, why he’s even thinking when he’s running, inhaling on every other foot-beat, unsure if he’s moving slower or faster or at his usual speed because there is only air and hills and orchards and grapes and the long lost memory of pears sprawling out for miles in every direction radially from him. 

And maybe it’s the smell. Sweet and salty like horses, spots of darkness carved and grazing into the sage grey hills, fuzzy in their winter coats. Eucalyptus sharp and lonely like elementary school, smoke from fire places, and then the unmistakable dryness of winter, forever reminding him that this is not the East Bay, not the city, there is no sea and no fog, not for miles upon miles. 

Sweat collects in the creases of his elbows, under the fleecy insides of his hoodie. It’s so familiar a feeling that he doesn’t even realize he’s sweating, because these days he always is; he only wears anything less than long sleeves if he’s alone or fucking, and even then only half the time. He speeds up, just as Selena Gomez pleads for him to slow down. His ankles and shins are numb from the spaces frozen by the air that’s crept through his socks and adidas track pants, and for a moment, he thinks she’s brilliant for that dichotomy, for the tension created by speed and slowness and their opposite but equal pulls. 

But it only lasts for a moment, because the way most music works these days seems on accident, like all the intention is in Davey’s brain rather than the actual music. He’s not even sure Selena wrote the lyrics to this song. It doesn’t matter. It’s a great song. A great single. He loves her in the effortless, detached way old men love young girls. 

He thinks about all the times he’s jacked off thinking about her, propping her up with her ass in the air on the side of the bed and eating the pouty, young crease between her thighs dewy and sweet and mouth coating like the salt water taffy at the Santa Cruz Boardwalk he used to spend summer Tuesday nights with Jade at, riding the Big Dipper over and over again. Splitting her apart like a playboy spread and crooking his fingers inside until she squirts over his lap. Her stupidly round face flushed, her smoky eyes shut tight, making her look like a little girl in her first communion dress, too young to look so old. Young enough to be his daughter were he the type of person to ever want a daughter. Definitely young enough to be Jade’s daughter, and then there’s Jade again, Jade laughing in the dark tunnel before the ascension before the Big Dipper’s first drop.

Davey shakes the image of Selena’s bubble gum everything out of his mind. He hates getting chubbies while he runs. He hates thinking about anything when he runs. He hates thinking about Jade. He skips to the next song, and Jason Derulo saves him from smooth brown legs and shampoo soft hair and things he never wanted when he was her age, but craves so desperately now they make him nearly sob with longing, lips formed loose and lusting around the single word lost. He feels like the mere desire for it is forcing him to age faster than he already is, like having it would falsely restore some part of him forgotten along the way, taken by Jade, to its former glory. 

It’s an absurd thing to think, because he’s fucked plenty of girls as young and slender as Selena Gomez and they are never as perfect as he expects them to be. Nothing ever changes, and the lines beside his eyes multiply regardless, the ink stays deep and permanent in his skin. 

The air is so cold it burns his lungs, and his throat sticks to itself. Plumes of steam rise from the spectacular shit pile a cow has just dropped in a field to his left, and everything smells impossibly organic, impossibly rotten. He’s been watching a dark spot on the road out ahead of him flicker in and out of shapes he can recognize, but now he’s consciously aware that it’s roadkill, an opossum or raccoon. 

He passes it with his cold, gloved hand over his nose and mouth. It’s stiff with ice and rigor, limbs sticking out like the legs of the dressed turkey his mother will be basting all day, in the same oven as his clinical, processed, oval soy substitute. The animal seems nearly intact, save for its ruined jaw, broken into a mess on the road to which it is adhered with a slick of frozen blood. Davey has spent so much time slaving away over the toilet, forcing his fingers to the back of his throat and bringing up saliva and coughs and foam long before he got what he wanted that throwing up is easy now, happens when it’s not what he wants, in that detached, effortless way that old men love young girls.

His mouth suddenly full, he pulls off the side of the road and pukes in someones gravel driveway. It’s mostly water and last nights dinner, so thin and digested he almost forgets what it was, were it not for the dark streaks of spinach, black and twisted and unchewed. He spits a final string out, wipes his mouth with the sweaty back of his hand, and starts up running again, hoping he didn’t lose stride. The splatter of vomit steams behind him like the cow shit, acrid and sour, and Jason Derulo sings _give me twenty five to life_ while Davey wonders why it feels like he’s running away from the music this morning, rather than running to it.


	2. dropping like flies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first Burials era fic I wrote was called Inhumation. This story is, in many ways, a deeper, clearer, (and perhaps unnecessary) rehashing of a lot of the themes and images I introduced in that story. You can read it if you want, it's 1/17th the size this thing ended up.
> 
> Also, every chapter title is stolen from a top 40s pop song that was popular in the last few years. Let me know if you're curious as to which ones; they'd make a good sound track to this if you're into that kind of thing.

Hunter doesn’t even realize it’s Thanksgiving until he texts Jade for his birthday. _it’s the big four zero but you don’t look a day over fifteen!_ he taps with dull fingers and thumbs, wondering how Davey is holding up, if Davey is holding up. He finds Davey’s name on his phone and types him out a message that reads are you okay? before thinking better of it, and deleting each letter one by one. Hunter sips his coffee, black and too weak, and watches his phone vibrate a path across the table, stopping seconds short of a suicide drop to the carpet. 

_fifteen? I was hoping I could at least pass as legal. Happy tofurkey day to you._ Jade tells him. Hunter rubs his face, stubble scouring his open palm. He checks the calendar on his phone, and sure enough, there it is in neat, sad italics: _Thanksgiving Day US. (observed)._

He knew Thanksgiving was coming up in some strange, distant way. He had to, it’s not as if Hunter is socially isolated. There’s a difference between loneliness and isolation, and though Hunter is always lonely, he is never isolated. He dumps his coffee out into the sink and adds more grounds to the filter, planning to rebrew a pot of Thanksgiving coffee now that he knows it’s Thanksgiving. He has plans tonight, plans he forgot about, plans he assumed were coming up soon but not this soon, not with the increasing ferocity and insistence with which holidays approach when you grow older. 

Davey continues to skirt around the edges of Hunter’s awareness in this invasive, irritating way, like a fly he keeps swatting off his arm, buzzing about the room until it again lands on the back of his hand, filthy and soon to die. Hunter keeps brushing Davey off, chasing him to a corner with a rolled up newspaper, but Davey and his noisy reminder of both their imminent mortalities continues to return. Many-eyed, shit-eating, unwelcome. 

Steam rises from the coffee maker as it burbles. Hunter has a nice coffee maker, one of his few non-musical luxuries. Hunter does not live like a rockstar, he doesn’t even live like a well-off investment banker or medical professional or something respectable like that. He lives much like he did after college: cheaply, efficiently, comfortably, but not too comfortably. His guitars and horns and record rarities stored in glass cases in his studio are the nicest things he owns, but they’re collector-nice, not rich-guy nice.

Hunter will always be uncomfortable with conspicuous wealth, it will always remind him of Zooey and her family, their echoing marble foyer and garage full of cars and first class airline tickets they took for granted and he did not, a difference with doomed their relationship to an unshakeable divide of shame. It seems strange now that the thing he most remembers about Zooey is not her smell, not her laugh, not her long, deft fingers closed around the Kaiser pen while she did the Times crossword on Sunday mornings in her robe and slippers like a normal person, but her money. And not even her money, but her parents money, Caleb and Mary Jo and the wild, easy eccentricity they were allowed to cultivate because they could afford to. 

Hunter rarely thought of Zooey for a good eight year block. She would occasionally resurface in the way feelings untainted with trauma do, organically and painlessly, when he heard the Offspring’s “She’s Got Issues” or when something reminded him of The Sound of Music and he imagined her imitations of the Von Trapp family, her sweet singing voice which at the time was only used at Karaoke parties and during car singalongs. It seems strange that now, ten years and many movies, many records labels later, he would think of Zooey and Caleb and Mary Jo and their foyer. 

Then again, conspicuous wealth is something Davey causes him to think about, and Davey is buzzing about the perimeter of the room. Many-eyed, shit-eating. Unwelcome. Hunter pours himself a new cup of coffee, the steam rising and touching his lips like uncertain fingers, and he can tell it’s much better this time. Much stronger. 

Though they have essentially the same amount of money, the same record sales, the same charmed and uncharmed life of making a living as an artist, Davey is different. Davey drapes himself in his money, he lives like a celebrity with the seasonal designer suits he wears to premiers and parties and invite only dinners, with his cold, room-festooned house in Oakland and LA flat on Fountain. Large enough to hold Davey and Davey’s miles and miles of every-growing loneliness. Davey and his collections, Davey and his one night fucks. Davey and his memories. Lonely, but not isolated. 

The difference between Davey and people like Mary Jo and Caleb is that every cent he spends, every breath he sucks past his dying lips, is saturated in self-awareness. Wether that self awareness is self-loathing or self-satisfied, it’s awareness nonetheless. Davey knows what money is, he knows what it means. He knows because he used to live the way Hunter did in college, the way he still lives. Davey came from the same sprawl of tule grass, the same heaps and heaps of pears as Hunter did. But now they’re both stuck in Los Angeles, attempting to shore the young, idealistic, ramen-eating and penny-pinching versions of themselves up with the twisted, decaying things they’ve become, money-corrupted, stripped of innocence down to bones.

Hunter does this by spending money on what brought him here, the reason for his wealth. Davey does it by spending money on everything, and creating the perfect version of what he hates. It’s a microcosm of the way they’ve always existed: Hunter in humor and pragmatics, Davey in devastation and excess. It’s because of this that Hunter understands with a skeleton-deepness why Jade left. Why Davey does what he does, why Davey flays open his flesh and fills the vacancy with young, seething bodies like they’re salve, like they’re maggots to eat away infection. 

It’s the reason why Hunter does the same, filthy thing which he does not know. 

Hunter stirs his coffee by rotating the cup in small, quick circles on his counter top, and the darkness swirls inside. _don’t worry, I’d sell you a lotto ticket. and thanks, likewise_ he types up to Jade, hitting send and thinking again of Zooey, of whom Jade’s new wife has always distantly reminded him. Davey is lost amid the pear-replacing grapevines somewhere, thinking of Jade, Hunter is sure. And this is something that happens often, Hunter thinking of Davey thinking of Jade, feeling safe and protected by the fact that Davey is not thinking of him, and that he is only another squirming maggot pressed into a fetid wound, and not the sun witnessing the 14,640th rotation of the earth.


	3. can't get back yesterday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't really know why but I don't like Nils or find him attractive. I would probably like him if I met him for more than three seconds, but that has never happened. You can probably taste my dislike in my stories which involve him.

“You’ve gotten skinnier,” Davey tells Nils, closing in on the dark silhouette seated at his usual corner table in Intelligentsia. He alights one hand on his shoulder, feeling bones and sadness twitch under his palms. Nils turns to face Davey, a smile insipid and watery on that wide, pink mouth. He’s wearing his sunglasses inside, and Davey reaches out, takes the bridge between thumb and forefinger, and removes them, leaving bloodshot eyes to blink in the brightness. 

“And you haven’t,” he replies. He seems unswallowed by the landscape, this slip of black Davey could not convince himself was imagined. 

Davey sits down opposite of him. “You’re hung over.” 

“Something like it,” Nils sighs, showing his teeth in his smile, sharp and flashing and Davey imagines his throat between them for a second, ripped clean from his body like he deserves, blood nearly black where it would be smeared across the white angle of Nils’s chin. “How did you know I would be here?” he asks then, folding long, broad-knuckled fingers before him as if he were preparing to pray. 

Staring at those hands, Davey allows himself to remember holding them, wringing them while he came into the neat, pale hollow of Nils’s stomach, stretched between the jut of hip bones, back when something that simple was enough to keep the decay from maiming him motionless. “I know you,” Davey risks saying, lining his dark eyes up with Nils’ sad splashes of snowmelt blue. He used to love Nils’s eyes, the vapid model emptiness of them. But they are ringed in a hardness now, a pain. Another once pure and simple thing Davey ruined. 

Nils makes a face, and puts his sunglasses back on. “No, you don’t. Not anymore.” 

Davey sits back, tonguing the corner of his mouth. “You’re right. Sorry. I try.” 

“Try harder or don’t try at all,” Nils tells him, and it’s a bitter thing but it doesn’t sound bitter. This is how things are with them now, formerly crystalized with feeling, now melted into a puddle on pavement. One which will evaporate once the sun comes out, leaving nothing but a watermark. 

“I was just passing through Sunset Junction, and I guessed. I got lucky,” Davey says.  
r32;“Lucky,” Nils says distantly, raising one of his thin eyebrows to a point, gazing into the oblique. “I’m probably supposed to ask how you are, right? That’s protocol?” he says, mouth flatlining, going dead and bloodless for a moment. 

Davey shrugs. “I don’t think protocol is applicable anymore. But, if by some chance there’s an authentic curiosity on your part, I’m doing fine.” 

Nils stirs his drink, and does not bend to sip from it. It’s pale like him, milky and watery. An iced Americano, maybe. “There is,” he says quietly. Then, “Authentic curiosity, I mean.” And Davey is fleetingly sorry for what became of them, before the numbness returns, before the water stain fades under the sunlight. “I worried, after the Fonda. It’s like touring made you regress back into it. I thought you were doing better for awhile, you know. But there’s nothing I can do anymore, so I just have to watch, while you fall apart and ignore my texts.” 

Surprised by so many words, Davey sits back, looking over his shoulder at the shuffling din of twenty somethings, all of which are fashionable in the same way Nils is, slender and reflective behind mirrored lenses, dress shoes and velvet leggings and un-scuffed docs and denim half vests. Effortlessly young, easy and smooth and smiling. He turns back to Nils, remembering when he used to be one of them, before Davey painted lines in his face, drew the skin tight around his eyes and then released it, letting it gather and pucker and swell because he could not stand to stand so closely with someone who did not understand. He swallows, and says, “I know. But I’m fine now.” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Nils sighs, stretching, pushing his drink across the table. “Like I said. There’s nothing I can do about it if you don’t want me to. Do you want something? Sencha?” he asks. 

Davey shakes his head, changing the subject. “I hate Sunset Junction,” he says, smiling harsh and creased and broken in the only way he knows how. It’s true. Sunset Junction is one of the thousand haunted places scattered across the state, places in which he feels suffocated by the past, crippled by the weight of memories. 

“Why are you here, then? I know it’s not to see me,” Nils asks. Then adds with a defensive smile, “You just got lucky.” 

Davey didn’t expect this question, and he feels his flesh pricking in response, a nervous heat spreading from his ears to his cheeks. The truth belies nothing, so if he told Nils, there would be no consequence. It’s not translucent, and Nils is no longer perceptive because they no longer know each other. It only feels that way because of the haunting, the hanging haze of memories stuck in the Silverlake smog making him confuse something that was, for something that is. 

But he doesn’t want to tell Nils why he’s here. It feels private, it feels like a revelation. He would not want to tell himself were his soul to detach from his body, rise, escape and appear before the flesh, asking him. It’s the type of truth he doesn’t even want to admit when alone. 

“I’m meeting a friend for lunch,” he half lies. 

Nils scoffs. “A friend? And you’re eating now. Interesting.” 

Davey shakes his head, tired of this game between them, where Nils jabs at his defenseless body, entitled to hurt him because of how badly he was hurt. It reminds him of the never-ending game he plays with Jade, but Jade is everything. Nils is just a boy, once a friend and once a lover, now something less than either of those. He licks his lips, and pushes the Americano with its film of water resting above the milk and coffee towards Nils. “And you’re not. Interesting. And I’m meeting Hunter, so don’t get excited,” he half lies again, feeling a rush of warmth and adrenaline coursing through his chest at the revelation, at the almost-truth. 

Nils raises his chin, nods curtly and smiles that violent flash of smile again. “Hunter. Right. Okay, Dave.” 

Davey shrugs, and stands. He feels like a landmark amid all the youth, this monument, a memorial built to honor what used to be young, but now might as well be already dead, pulled preserved and choked in black from the La Brea Tarpits. “I’m sorry about everything,” Davey half-lies again, and leans to kiss Nils at his hairline, which smells like soap and cigarettes. 

Nils lets him do it. “I know you are. Return my texts next time. And say hello to Hunter from me.” He slides the last part in with a sardonic undercurrent, and part of Davey wishes that Nils still knew him.


	4. only have two hands

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Herein lies graphic het! Stay away if that's an issue.

Hunter wakes up with sun in his eyes, the head-aching kind with the floating dust particles and nauseating warmth. For the stirring seconds before he realizes where he is, his hands make fists in unfamiliar silk sheets the color of ballet slippers. Then he remembers the girl he went home with and fucked last night. Jennifer. Or maybe something close but more exotic, more unusual. Genevieve. She has a sugarskull tattooed on her right thigh, tremendously unoriginal, but she also has the type of tits Hunter likes, the barely there kind, the tiny storage of fat sweetening up the barren stretch of human sternum. 

He turns, blinking in the sunlight. She seems older in the morning hours, lines framing her open, sleeping mouth, foundation on her pillow, eyes hidden by one of those face masks. He can see a hint of grey near her temple. Something she missed when she redyed her roots chocolate brown, and fucking her last night almost seems like a waste. Almost. 

Reaching with clumsy fingers, he touches the wisp of grey, threads his hand up through the tangles she has at the back of her head from grinding it into the pillow while he are her out. She wakes up slow, sweet, pulls the mask over one eye to squint at him, smiling blearily. “Hey hot stuff,” she rasps, sleep breath sour on Hunter’s face. 

“Hey yourself,” he says gently, running his hand down her shoulder, down her side. Her nipples stick out like bullets, hard even in the drowsy warmth of her room because they’re pierced with barbells. “How you doing?” 

“Um, fantastic,” she laughs, shifting onto her back and closer to him, fitting within the cradle of his bent elbow and bicep. She winces, bringing one narrow thigh, the tattooed one, up to her chest for a moment. “Sore.” 

“Good sore or sleep on the couch after running a half marathon in the snow sore?” Hunter asks. 

She laughs, and her face looks young again, as young as it looked last night in the blue bar light at the Key Club. Humor is all Hunter has, it’s how he can get away with this, how he skirts along the edges of the accusation of sex addiction, of sleazy, predatory, douche bag. Because he’s funny, and he’s famous enough he can still seem humble at the Key Club. 

“Definitely, definitely good sore,” she purrs. 

“Alright. Then I guess I can forgive myself,” he mumbles. 

She rides him once more, thighs splayed over his hips, tits too small to bounce but still big enough to grab as she moves up and down on his dick. He makes bloodless fingerprints in the pale skin he grabs her so hard, and she moans loud, but not like a porn star. He comes, and it hurts. 

He showers alone in her bathroom before he leaves, and she slips him her number on a Target receipt while he’s there choking on steam, sliding it into the pocket of his black jeans in a damp pile on the mat. 

There are nail marks like tire tracks through the tattoo on his chest when he departs for Sunset Junction, and dark, thin marks on his neck from her teeth. He hates when they do that, it always makes him feel like he’s fifteen, but he keeps a mini comb and some toothpaste in his glove compartment to break it apart. A trick Davey taught him. He sits in his car outside Jennifer Genevieve’s apartment, sunglasses obscuring his eyes and the bags beneath them, and scrubs his neck with a comb in the rearview mirror to disperse the blood clotted under his skin. 

Then he squeezes out a blob of toothpaste (peppermint, Toms of Maine) onto his finger, and dabs it like paint onto the darkness before turning the key in the ignition, pulling out of her apartment complex’s parking garage. He’s somewhere in Los Feliz, he can tell by the height of the palm trees, the build of the curbs, and the banners advertising orchestra shows at the Hollywood Bowl. 

Hunter turns on the radio. It’s Avicii on KROQ, Avicii when he spins the dial to KISS. It feels like he’s caught in a wormhole of Avicii, and there are commercials blaring on every other station, so he turns the dial down until the sound dies, and waits for something to change. Avicii unsettles him. Next red light, he checks to see if he’s escaped the Avicii wormhole, but the chorus of Hey Brother is still slamming away, and he gives up. 

Clips from last night keep surfacing in his mind, bloated and bobbing like long since drowned stiffs, just looping images short and endless like a DVD menu. Jennifer Genevieve on her back with her knees around her ears while he pile drives her into the mattress. Jennifer Genevieve smiling up at him between coy licks to the head of his dick. He hates it when they smile at him, but it’s something nearly all of them do, like they think it’s something he wants, something every guy gets off on. He hates it because it belies experience, it’s a gesture that says, _you’re gonna like this. I’m good at it. I’ve done it to lots of boys before you._

He closes his eyes when girls are sucking him off so he can imagine their faces young and confused, the expression porn actresses have on their faces in those Milfs Teaching Teens videos, like they’ve never seen a cock before in their lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s real or not, sex is mugging. Hunter knows that. He’d just rather they mug like a Disney Princess, the teen rather than the milf. Then he can trick his dick into thinking this whole thing is new. 

Another red light, another loop of last night’s DVD. Jennifer Genevieve’s back skin pale and sweat-dewy as he pounds into her from behind. Her sugar skull changing shape as her thighs tense on either side of his head. His own fingers sifting through the grey roots at her temple in the morning light, the parenthetical lines on either side of her mouth there like fingerprints in memory foam long after she stops smiling. 

Hunter rubs his palm across his face, stomach turning over its own emptiness. He needs coffee soon, or else he is going to have a headache all day. It’s just another thing he’s addicted to, another thing he stalks and kills and consumes with singleminded determination regardless of how repeatedly disappointing the reality is in contrast with the craving. That’s what an addiction is. Pursuit due to empty need rather than want. 

He tries the radio again, and it’s Daft Punk. He keeps it and sighs. He’s going to be late, but knowing Davey, he still might arrive first.


	5. pick up what i'm putting down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My favorite album of 2013 besides Burials is Krewella's Get Wet. It's fantastic. Davey loves it, too, and not just in this work of fiction.

Flore is too small a restaurant to lose someone in, but Davey is scanning it with his sunglasses on, and Hunter can sometimes blend into the backgrounds of things with his jeans and black teeshirts and shaved head. There are lots of people who look like Hunter in Sunset Junction, and Davey’s eyes aren’t trained to react to them in the same way his eyes are trained to react to the Jades of the world, the Jades of Sunset Junction. For a moment he thinks he’s going to have to wait for Hunter, but on second glance, he sees him. His back turned away from the door, a mug of steaming house coffee in front of him next to the laminated menu. Davey approaches, then sits down. 

Hunter looks up, smiles briefly. “Thought I might beat you here.” 

“I ran into Nils. Thought it would be best to suffer through his reprimands out in public. You have toothpaste on your neck, by the way,” Davey says, pointing to the blot of chalky white, dried to near crumbling, on Hunter’s stubbled throat. Hunter shrugs, licks his index finger, and wipes it away. 

“Minty” he says. 

“Exciting night last night?” Davey asks, leaning as close as he deems unsuspicious to examine the fading mark in the divot between Hunter’s pulse and windpipe. Hunter’s palm, neat and square, rises to rub at absently at his neck. 

“Okay night. I don’t know. She was much older this morning than she was last night,” Hunter rests the rim of his coffee mug against his upper lip thoughtfully, blue eyes twinkling. 

“They always are,” Davey says. He has this theory that when he fucks people he ages them steals years from their life. And there is a portrait somewhere of him aging, a portrait which looks as ancient as he feels. “Was she at least good at what she did? Minus the vampire bites.” 

“Yeah. She was.” Hunter pulls the crumpled receipt out of his pocket she gave him, unfolds it without looking at it, and slides it across the table towards Davey. “Sweet girl. This is her, if you want to see for yourself.” 

Davey examines the receipt. “You fucked a girl named Guinevere? That’s fantastic. I’d consider it a win for this fact alone.” 

Hunter’s eyebrows shoot up into startled arcs. “I guess I win, then.” 

Davey is still reading, bent over the table. “Hair dye. Power foundation. Olay Regenerist Eye cream. I was picturing older that seventeen older but this looks like maybe older than thirty older,” he hypothesizes, watching Hunter’s reaction carefully, though his lashes. It feels strange to be doing this in public, to be speaking the unspeakable, to be admitting their age somewhere the air can touch their words once golden and taint them pewter grey. Come on make me feel until the pain don’t matter is one of his favorite lyrics off of one of his favorite albums of 2013. It’s such a tragic, desperate plea, sung in such a pure, young voice. Another dichotomy he sees in every song. Children singing about death. _Take me home_ , he thinks. _where my dreams are made of gold._

“No. Maybe twenty eight or nine,” Hunter mumbles, reaching across the table and snatching the receipt back. “Guinevere,” he repeats. “Interesting.” 

Hunter orders the flatbread pizza, Davey orders nothing, then rethinks it moments after their very pretty tattooed waiter leaves, calling her back and instead asking for one of the cupcakes behind the glass, a red velvet one, with white icing he licks off slow and careful like a kid with an ice cream cone he doesn’t want to drip, or someone attempting to prolong their only meal for the rest of the day. He likes that Hunter doesn’t watch him with concerned eyes. He likes that Hunter doesn’t care whether or not this his only meal for the rest of the day. He likes it as much as is saddens him, which is enough to make his stomach ache. He thinks that if it were a different year, he would flirt with their waitress, but it’s the end of 2013. 

“What did you do last night?” Hunter asks while he waits for his food to come, scratching absently at the snake on his forearm in this way that makes Davey think he might be occupying his fingers in order to prevent them from touching the fading dark spot on his throat. 

Davey clears his throat, mouth numb and clumsy from crunching the ice in his water cup. Their waitress comes back, refills their water glasses and smiles at Davey. He wonders if she recognizes him, or merely finds him handsome. “Not much. Not a girl named Guinevere.” He says once she leaves. 

Hunter smiles with half his mouth, and Davey finds himself thinking it’s attractive. That Hunter has a nice face. It’s the passive kind of attraction, the I _would_ fuck you kind, not the I want to fuck you kind. It’s easy to brush aside and forget about, slightly harder to act upon, but Davey usually chooses the harder thing, if only to challenge himself. _Come on make me feel alive_ he thinks. 

“You’re falling behind. I’m starting to feel pathological in comparison.” Hunter’s face is hard to read.

“I know,” Davey sighs. “ _I’m_ starting to feel impotent. Ancient.” 

“Maybe this is normal. What normal people do. Maybe you’re recovering, and I’m still maladjusted.” 

Davey shakes his head, swiping another pathway through vegan cream cheese icing with the tip of his tongue. “I’m afraid we’re both quite maladjusted. I’m definitely not recovering. Relapsing, maybe. Into something else.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” Hunter says gravely, and they sip their water in unison. The restaurant chatter takes up the space between them for a moment, and neither says anything. Hunter is staring at the table top thoughtfully, and Davey is staring at Hunter. Waiting for him to contradict him, prove him wrong, convince him otherwise. Tell him that they are liberated and evolved for not being afraid of sex. Davey doesn’t believe or want to believe this, he only wants to retort with a bitter laugh, and experience the satisfaction one experiences when laughing bitterly at something.

But Hunter does not tell him anything of the sort, because Hunter is just like him, and knows it’s not true. This is why they’re here together, why they tell each other who they fucked last night and how, why they exchange girls phone numbers and read the contents of their Target receipts aloud in public like cruel people. Because they’re the same, and sameness causes you to act the way you act when you are alone, and alone, everyone is a cruel person.

“Yeah, but I would give yourself a break,” Hunter finally tells him. “The tour fucked you up. Whatever improvements you might have made in the last year, whatever sexual coping you were able to use, is probably not going to work for a little while. You’ve had to revisit those songs you wrote from that time, so you probably regressed into that state to some degree. No offense. I’m sure it’ll change given a little time.” 

“That’s exactly what Nils said, by the way. So I’ll be back to bending eighteen year olds over my bathroom counter soon?” Davey says glumly before taking his very first bite of actual cupcake. It’s too sweet, but he enjoys it in spite of that, which he supposes is ironic in lieu of their conversation. 

“And then sending them to me. Yep,” Hunter says. Their waiter comes back, bearing pizza. It smells intensely of garlic, and Davey’s mouth waters for real food. He watches Hunter’s strong knuckled hands separate a slice with a fork. “You should really have some of this,” he tells him without looking up.

“You know, it’s not just that I’ve regressed into the state I was in last year or whatever. That’s part of it, those thoughts and feelings and stuff, but it feels...I don’t know, _biological_. My sex drive itself has dwindled substantially. I don’t even want the actual sex, let alone all the bullshit that comes along with it, all the seduction and secrecy and shit.” 

“Brain and body, dude. They’re the same. Don’t fall into that trap of thinking they’re not,” Hunter warns him with a mouth full of pizza.

And Davey gets his chance to laugh bitterly at something Hunter said. He licks crumbs the color of blood off his fingers, eyes trained on Hunter’s lithe, sinewy forearms. He pictures them braced on either side of a girl’s head, a voluptuous, vintatge pornstar type with a jutting ribcage like tectonic plates, because that is how he imagines a girl named Guinevere who is twenty eight or twenty nine to look. “You know, I still need to come though,” he says after a moment, gaze flicking up to Hunter’s eyes, color perhaps rising to his cheeks, but only just. 

“Yeah. Me too,” is what Hunter answers, and Davey is shocked to feel something akin to arousal, flickering like a half-dead ember beneath layers and layers of gut. _Come on,_ he thinks. _Make me feel alive._


	6. if the sky comes falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man. Here there be Hunvey sex, though I don't really think it's fair to call this story a Hunvey.
> 
> Also, I meant to mention this in the notes for the prior chapter, but the lyrics I pulled from that Krewella song, Alive, are so crazy important. I want people to listen to that song and think about it.
> 
> This story was originally titled '17crimesish' on my computer before it had an official title, because I was basically writing around a lot of the ideas of loss and longing and aging addressed in that song, and particularly the video.
> 
> I almost forgot this, but when I saw the 17 Crimes video for the first time, my initial comment was, "that was the Alive video, spliced with AFI performing sadly from the Underworld." I'm not even kidding, go watch them and compare notes. The link between that song and 17 Crimes continues to be integral to what is explored in this story as a whole, seeing as it acts as a microcosm of the link between pop music and youth in 2013, and Burials. You all probably think I'm crazy and I might be. Sorry.

They do it in Hunter’s car, parked atop a steep hill on a residential street somewhere behind the Welcome to the Silverlake Sunset Junction sign. Davey lays on his stomach in the back seat, face flushed and screwed up and all his clothes on, save for his linen navy slacks unbelted and bunched about his pale, tattooed thighs to expose enough skin for Hunter to thrust against. Davey keeps his eyes closed the whole time, and bites his wrist so hard it makes Hunter cringe on his behalf to witness the deep, bloodless indentations turn a solid purple after Davey lets go. 

Davey’s body is graceless and obscene in this position as Hunter ruts into him, dick a bright, humiliating red against white skin. The car rocks; Davey’s palms stretch out, flattening on either side of the door handle and safety lock. “Hurt me,” Davey says plainly, eyes still shut so tight his face is a map of terrible lines. And Hunter doesn’t know why, but it turns him on to hear him say that. It turns him on to bend, to latch his teeth onto the loose skin at the back of Davey’s neck and chew with abandon. To bite down and down until blood vessels under his skin break the way he hates to have his own blood vessels under his skin broken. 

“Hurt me more. Hit me,” Davey gasps. Hunter shifts his weight so that he can free up his right hand, which he balls into a fist, jabbing Davey sharp and fast into his back, above the kidney, beneath the scapula. Davey sobs a wrecking sob, and sun streams in through the tinted windows, casting his stubbled cheek in a slate grey light. Hunter hits him again, and again, and feels Davey’s body snap desperately into the backseat, where he laid out his grey American Outfitters sweatshirt before he pushed Davey onto his stomach because he doesn’t want Davey’s come to get on his upholstery. 

“Choke me,” Davey mumbles, and Hunter tightens his fist over his bobbing Adam’s apple gladly, eagerly, dick twitching. It’s easy to hurt Davey, who wants it. Who needs it to come, because sex with slender men, who have string-roughened fingertips and plush mouths and a shared history of playing music together is something Davey needs to live now, something he needs but equates so irrevocably with pain that they are nearly the same now. Hunter is happy to give this to Davey, because it’s real. It’s sex without the show, without the lies. It’s sex between equals. He doesn’t have to pretend to be anything to Davey, who in turn, doesn’t have to pretend that he wants him for who is is, rather than who he is a substitute for. It’s easy to hurt Davey, who wants nothing from him.

Breath stutters out of Davey like ellipses, his cheeks vivid with color, wet with spit and tears. Hunter doesn’t find him beautiful, but he’s deeply satisfied by seeing him like this. He groans as he thrusts along the crack of Davey’s ass, thinking of all the times Jade held Davey down like this and felt something. Felt love, terror, absolution. All the things Davey is left craving from that endlessly deep wound, the things Davey cannot forget and cannot replicate. It makes Hunter hard to know he can’t give Davey any of those things, but can only give him a temporary kind of pain, surface deep and clean and unscarring. It turns him on to know they mean nothing to each other. 

He doesn’t wonder what that says about him. He comes all over Davey’s back, ribbons of it landing on designer fabric, another thing he finds deeply satisfying. Davey spasms under him breathlessly, saliva bubbling out of his blue lips, legs shuddering involuntarily as Hunter crushes his windpipe. He imagines the sparkling headrush Davey gets when he releases his throat, the ensuing blindness upon blindness rushing white into black like the tide. 

Davey gasps, grinding his hips into Hunter’s sweatshirt. Hunter bites the tight, firm roll of scalp at the base of Davey’s skull where it meets his neck as hard as he can, the short, shaved hairs there scouring his tongue, and Davey yelps, twists away from him, lurching as messily as a boat at sea when he comes. 

The ringing in Hunter’s ears dies down as he peels himself off of Davey’s ass, wiping his dick with Davey’s shirt and tucking himself back into his pants. He winces, the skin on his shaft feeling raw, bruised, drawn tight, too sensitive. Davey lies like a corpse, breath shallow and wet sounding like he was just saved from drowning. The sounds of the city below them come back slowly. The sad, low coo of mourning doves, the chatter of starlings and brewers blackbirds as they fight over their places on the telephone wires overhead. The laughter of the afternoon joggers, chatting over the jingle of their dog’s tags.The forever din of traffic in LA, raging on in the maze of freeways surrounding them like the messy filigree of a nervous system.

Hunter leans into the front seat and plays with a radio dial for a second. The pounding synth of Hey, Brother fades into existence, and he mumbles, “Are you fucking kidding me,” before he changes it. 

Davey, who he was beginning to write off as dead, reaches behind him with a limp wrist and hand to tap Hunter on the thigh. “No. I like that song,” he murmurs, mouth still pressed into the car seat. 

“Really?” Hunter asks, amused, eyebrow raised even though Davey’s eyes are still fiercely shut. 

“Mmmhm. Not as much as Wake Me Up, but I do like it.” 

“They’re not the same song?” Hunter marvels, clicking back to the Avicci wormhole, letting its vapid neon-backwoods sound suck him in to a twisting whirlpool of unoriginality. He wonders if he would like this song, too, if he were younger. Then he remembers he is younger than Davey, at least.

“Not at all,” Davey explains, rolling onto his side painstakingly. He pulls his shirt up, wincing at the red marks made from Hunter’s knuckles and their repeated impact. He blinks, although it is not bright in the car. 

“Wow. You learn something new every day,” Hunter says. He leans back, sighing in the sunlight, unsure of what time it is. Without meaning to, he makes eye contact with Davey, who happens to be looking at him when his own gaze slides over. “Your sex drive doesn’t seem as nonexistent as you made it out to be,” he says, deciding to acknowledge the strangeness of this situation rather than ignoring it. 

Davey closes his eyes again, mouth flattening out. “This isn’t sex.” 

Hunter nods, knowing on some symbolic, abstract level, this is true. “Then what is it?” He asks, because it’s something he wants to know if it keeps happening like this. 

Wings ruffle, pigeons cry, and a cyclist’s bell rings. Traffic surges, sounding like the ocean roar in a conch shell, and Davey’s lungs wheeze over the newness of breath. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. “A reminder.”


	7. all ends with beginnings

It’s an hour into a new day and Davey’s flesh is crawling with the past, decay alive with worms. His skin is still burning from where Hunter came on him,and the tail of his shirt, (ivory, semi-translucent, Marc Jacobs) is soaking in a bowl of luke warm water in his kitchen sink. He wonders if he will think of Hunter’s come each time he wears this shirt from now on, even though the fabric won’t stain. Davey’s mind stains easily, there is evidence of that everywhere, sewn into his body like ink. 

He sits on the kitchen floor, pounding head in his hands, dust in the corners. The headache started mid afternoon and hasn’t left. He knows it’s hunger related, but there’s nothing to eat in the fridge, nothing cohesive and Davey requires cohesion in his meals, he needs them to mean something or else they are useless. Face tingling, he rubs at his stubbled cheeks, dry tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth. He’s playing Krewella on the stereo in the living room, and although from here he can only hear the bass, he knows a young voice is pleading _stay here_. Then, _let me come undone_. It doesn’t sound like pleading, but Davey knows better. He feels like he knows things about these songs because this is one of his favorite albums of 2013. 

Davey loathes feeling sorry for himself, but it’s easy to sink into when he’s alone. It manifests into a real thing with no one to witness his self-pity and call him on it, wrench him from the things he drowns in, distract him with the mundane, the miraculous way the earth still revolves. He’s very alone right now, and therefore, feeling very, very sorry for himself. White sparkles in his vision as he shifts his head, and there is no use pretending that every single thing he does is not dictated by an invisible force which lives a (uselessly calculated) 12.67 miles away in a shared home with a mailbox and a dog run in West Hollywood. There is no use pretending that every single thing, from the sensation of hunger to the stutter of _s-s-s-top, so long now, leave the world behind_ to the not-stain of pearl on ivory in his sink, does not force Davey to think of Jade. 

Things were a little better before the tour. In the stretch of time after writing and before the road, when his compulsions felt purged, acknowledged. The calm following the storm of self-indulgence, the fresh air rushing into scorched lungs upon being pulled from a burning building. But now, things were different. It was still LA air, it had only been clean in comparison, and now he was tasting the smog again, the loneliness, the chemicals. Burials had been a eulogy for Jade, for himself and the part of himself who still believed, (foolishly, against all evidence and logic) that he still _had_ Jade. 

But now Davey is realizing only that Burials was an _attempt_ at a eulogy. Because writing it didn’t end things, just as marriage didn’t end things. Davey exhumes, it’s what he does. It’s what he’s made of. He cannot escape their story, it’s written on his body in permanent marker, he suffered through hours of pain to immortalize it, he burnt effigy upon effigy in its name. He can’t let it go, and even if he could, there’s the shared home with the mailbox and the dog run 12.67 miles away. The seismic activity emanating from that site still touches him, still rumbles his foundations, still registers on his needle. 

So he sends his own vibrations down into the earth, shuddering along the rift of San Andreas, and hopes they register on Jade’s needle, too. 

It’s a pathetic thing to do, think about him. But Davey has spent years trying not to, trying to sever the clutch of his arteries as they reach out and latch around Jade’s throat, Jade’s ankles, begging him to stay, pleading for him to _let me come undone._ He knows by now that it’s a thing which cant be altered, so he might as well let it take him, let it sweep his body from the shore. He might as well sit on his kitchen floor with an incredible headache and thumb through the list of people he can but will not call for help, and spiral deeper and deeper into his anxiety, knowing Jade is 12.67 miles away, in his home with the flower boxes, not thinking of Davey unless he is thinking of how relieved he is to be free of him. 

“You’re not,” Davey says aloud, shamed in a distant way by his own voice. He rubs his face again, then scoots along the linoleum on his ass to the fridge, which he opens, squinting at the bright light of its interior. He closes it, because nothing has magically gained cohesion in the last fifteen minutes. 

Davey works on breathing, which is something he used to be so good at he didn’t have to work on it at all. He doesn’t pretend that he doesn’t want Jade, that it isn’t _all_ he wants, for Jade to show up on his doorstep and save him, heave him from the floor and steer him to the couch where Davey will loll listlessly like an invertebrate while Jade brilliantly finds cohesion among the scattered and half-expired ingredients in his cupboards and refrigerator. He will lie there with tears drying on his cheeks while Jade brings him a plate of something steaming, guides him to an upright position, and rubs his back while he Davey finally eats. All he wants is Jade’s lips at his ear. All he wants is the certainty he used to possess that he could treat Jade like this, he could leech all his lifeblood away, and still know _with certainty_ that Jade would stay, because it was what they _were_. 

Davey hasn’t had this side of Jade in ten years, but the memory is still raw and raised and scarred and inked on his body. He sees it every time he’s in the shower, through the haze of steam even when he tries not to look. The memory curls feathered, at his back and then again in neat, pointy script on his lower stomach. It’s everywhere, and he can’t forget it. 

To be cared for like this is not what Davey always wants. It’s a longing reserved only for the days most saturated in self pity, the most pathetic, the most depraved. Usually, he doesn’t want Jade to show up on his doorstep because he _knows_ he cannot offer him any of the things he wants, any of the things he wishes. It’s only when he is so very alone that he doesn’t _care_ what he cannot offer him. He wants Jade anyway, he wants him in the way that hurts most, the impossible sort of way. 

Davey shifts to his side, and presses a warm cheek against cool plastic and struggles to inhale, forcing his knees away from his chest. The fetal position is comforting but Davey has spent enough time on the floor to know he won’t fall asleep balled up like that. And the only way to end this is to fall asleep. 

He pushes air from his lungs and imagine what would happen if he texted Jade. _I need you to come to my apartment. I need it._ That type of urgency would ensure that Jade actually did appear on his doorstep, worried and flushed and of course, furious when he finds that Davey is not bleeding out into the bathtub, but only anxious. Only depressed. The same Davey Jade found day after day ten years ago, hungry and helpless. The same Davey he restructured his life and their plan and his future and his _whole existence_ to abandon. 

It feels like Davey’s head is splitting down the middle, between the eyes. He imagines cicadas pouring from the schism as it cracks, their clicking, many-jointed bodies glistening with blood. He gags a little bit, just bile and foam into his mouth until he swallows it down again, and thinks with a wild desperation, _he’d come if I asked him to. If I really needed it. He’d hate me, but he would come._ It disgusts him how comforting the thought is, how much it soothes the tight spiral of anxiety in his chest. He inhales, exhales, and does it again. 

Finally, he lets himself do the only thing more pathetic than texting Jade, and texts Hunter. _How would you feel about fucking me again today?_ He asks bluntly, with numb fingers and a static-hungry, blank mind. Something has to give because he can’t sleep right now. He’s tried, and he can’t. Something has to give, and this feels easier than dealing with the aftermath of calling Jade over. Plus, it will hurt more. He will be left in pain and unsatisfied afterwards, and he thinks that might be what he wants. 

Hunter replies quickly, for which Davey is thankful. _Not sure. my dick would like it. my brain might feel weird though. This is still you. So it’s weird, you know?_

Davey does know. He tells Hunter. _Yes. I am a mess. I could use some company. It’s not necessary, but if you’re up for it. let me know._

 _We’re both fucked up, remember? On my way. Don’t know what’s wrong with me :)_ Hunter texts back. Davey is upset by the smiley bracketing the end of the text for the duration of the half hour it takes for Hunter to get to his place. The traffic must be bad, because usually it takes fifteen minutes, which is short enough Davey can wipe his mind clean of thought and feeling until Hunter gets there, but this time he struggles against the current of ink, Jade’s body bobbing like corpse at the shore, all of the things he can’t offer him printed on his arms in faded, years old script. 

Hunter knocks; Davey shouts “It’s unlocked,” from his place on the ground. He sits with closed eyes, knees drawn to his chest, back against the kitchen counter while Hunter makes his way in the dim light towards him, Mcbeths quiet against the tile. He’s backlit, and could be anyone from Davey’s perspective. He could be Jade. He’s the right shape, maybe even the right height from down here. Davey squints, unable to stop from imagining. 

“I need help up,” Davey explains flatly. 

Hunter offers him a hand, pulls him shakily to his feet. “I don’t even know what we’re doing, Dave,” he says once they’re eye level. “I’m not sure what any of this means anymore.” 

“It means nothing. Nothing different. I just...I just need--” Davey is surprised to feel his throat close up around the threat of tears, choke him silent. White light clouds out the sharpness of his vision, and he pushes into Hunter’s chest, smelling his toothpaste, his aftershave, his laundry detergent. He’s never kissed Hunter, but he can imagine what it would feel like, the closeness of all these smells which are usually up against his back. 

“I know. I get it. I got it,” Hunter says curtly, and spins Davey around and puts one of his knees up on the counter, pinning him tight against the edge. Wincing, Davey sucks in air, buckles and steels himself against the sharp, sudden pain. He’s empty so it feels like the counter reaches all the way though him, knocks against his spine. Then he shakes his head, remembering that the pain is what he wants from this. 

“Okay,” he says weakly, laying his cheek down on the plastic cutting board there, flat next to the drying rack where it fell months ago, the last time someone came to Davey’s house and cooked for him, did his dishes. Hunter grips his ribcage crushingly, holds him tight and fierce and terrible, and inhales air roughly from his neck. 

Davey parts his thighs, lets Hunter feel around inside his loose fitting track shorts. “You’re not hard,” he observes. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Davey says through his teeth, eyes shut tight. “Just fuck me.” 

He can hear Hunter mumbling something under his breath, and tries his best not to hear what it is. Then there’s the clinking of a belt buckle, the rustle of a zipper, and heat rutting up against the inside of his thigh. A hand in his hair, pushing him ungently down onto the counter. Hunter spits in his hand, sucks two of his fingers into his mouth the way Davey has done countless times, and pushes up inside Davey’s ass without much preparation. It burns, and Davey can feel his body resisting, but his dick is also twitching, filling up with blood, stirring to life because this all feels like something from his past, something born from authentic desperation, and he’s made of muscle memories. 

Hunter hooks his fingers inside of him, up towards his lower back like Davey were a woman on her back and Hunter was trying to make her gush out onto his palm. Davey likes that, likes that Hunter doesn’t know who he is and how to make him come. He rocks into the pain, rocks into the counter, and makes a strangled noise because there is no escape from all of the ways this hurts. Hunter fucks in and out of him hard, holding his ass cheeks apart with his other hand, hips rocking against the back of Davey’s thigh. 

“You can put your dick in me,” Davey chokes out, voice syncopated by each silencing slam of the counter into his lungs. “I’m clean.” 

“Dunno if I am,” Hunter grunts. 

_I don’t care_ Davey thinks, but he knows he should care, so instead he says, “more fingers.” 

Hunter stretches him wider, and his dick sticks to his thigh with sweat and precum. “You’re bleeding,” he says, voice hot and wet in Davey’s ear. 

“Good,” Davey says, and rides the blinding, river of sensation home.


	8. chasing relentlessly

“Should I leave?” Hunter asks after a moment, having sunk to his haunches in the place he found Davey in when he first showed up here, sitting in his burnt out crater like a reptile seeking warmth. Something alien, less than human. His forehead is pressed into his palm, sticky from both their bodies. He can smell Davey’s shit under his nails. 

Davey shudders against the counter, still braced up against it with his quaking, parted legs. “I don’t know,” he says eventually. 

Hunter’s not sure why, but as he looks up at Davey, eyes fixed on the very tips of his wings where they’re faded from the rub of his pants and belt, he reaches up and touches Davey’s thigh. Runs his palm down it, gently, through the thatch of pink flowers curled there, the filigree of black vines. Davey winces, and Hunter’s hand springs back to his own body instinctually. 

The sound of Davey clearing his throat, small and ugly and trapped against granite. Then, “I think I want you to stay for awhile, if that’s not asking too much.” 

The world swims in front of Hunter for a moment, Davey’s steel-doored fridge and freezer with their plethora of event flyers tacked up to them with mermaid magnets, one thousand dates blending into one mess of color streaked grey. _All of this is too much,_ Hunter thinks, realizing with a frantic inflation of panic in his chest how insane this whole thing is. How stupid. How irresponsible. And it’s not as if he hasn’t had this realization before. He’s watched them both spiral together, tangled limbs and hurt touching in all the wrong places, knowing all the while what a grave mistake it was to start fucking Davey, but sinking anyway. 

And this is why something is wrong with Hunter. His relentless pursuit of orgasm, of that one singular flashing moment of white heat, the explosive tide of sea washing everything with any weight or meaning out into oblivion, will always win out over any logic or judgement. Hunter craves the moment when the madness and danger of what he is doing with Davey ceases to matter because coming is more important. It feels pure. It feels safe. It doesn’t make sense, but that is what sex does for Hunter. Cloaks him in a drive so singleminded and unsullied that he knows exactly, _exactly_ what he wants. Which is almost the same thing as knowing who he is. 

But this. Then there’s this part. The yawning emptiness in his chest after he’s given everything in his body. The miles and miles of charred land and smoking husks of trees after the orgasm has burnt him up, and all that is left of what was once pure, once certain, is the grey confusion of ash. The aftermath free of the chemical high and the adrenaline, the reality stark and cold and grotesque: Davey to his left, broken and bleeding and adhered to his own counter with cooling come, and Hunter on the ground, wondering why the fuck he keeps doing this, and why on earth Davey wants him to stay when they both know he is only a surrogate. 

“I can stay,” Hunter answers, feeling exhausted. 

It didn’t start out this way. Hunter never imagined he would be fucking Davey twice a day in any universe; he never even imagined a universe where he and Davey would hang out exclusively, repeatedly. They never had that type of relationship, Davey existed in another world, and Hunter had always been okay with that, with their differences. 

It all began with this girl Regina, a fan from Tampa they both fucked on separate occasions, on separate tours. It came to light somehow, which led to a conversation about fucking fans, which led to a lonely, late night confession, and then a tumbling list of names, cities, locations, regrets. Or not regrets. Hunter remembers Davey’s face in his own hands, his sad, tired eyes, his ghost of a smile, flickering out like windswept flame every time he said Jade’s name. Hunter remembers him saying Jade’s name a lot. They were in Manhattan, it was snowing, and it was 2010. 

Their dynamic shifted orbit following this conversation. Davey, a formerly irritating obstacle in Hunter’s ruthless pursuit of things to fuck and come inside, became a coconspirator: quietly, surreptitiously understanding the motives behind his motions. He began sharing things with Davey, phone numbers and stories, and in exchange Davey started sharing things with him. 

Admitting to fantasies about flesh far younger than his own, confessing complex highways of desires all overseen by a fictive Jade, pulling strings and writing scripts so Davey could trip through a labyrinth, while the real Jade refused to watch, refused to care. He had known Davey for over fifteen years, but not like this. 

Hunter and Davey formed an understanding around sex. Their feelings about sex, their shame, their loneliness, their desperation, their endless quest. And eventually, sharing girls seemed superfluous with that understanding, and without entirely cutting out the connective tissue holding their joint together, Hunter and Davey’s understanding around sex became sex itself, and here they were. 

Davey slowly begins moving beyond the slight, nudging tremor of his breathing ribcage, and slides down to meet Hunter on the ground. Then, in an clumsy shift of weight, his head drifts to Hunter’s shoulder. “I still think about telling him to come over. To take care of me,” Davey mumbles into the collar of Hunter’s black oxford. 

“What stops you?” Hunter asks, carefully. 

Davey shrugs, a stiff, alien movement against him. “It’ll just turn into a fight if Jade sees me like this. If not now, it will later, and a fight isn’t always what I want. I just want what I want, and he can’t give that to me on most days.” 

Hunter knows what it feels like to have bodies against his own, bodies which seek comfort, bodies who want hands in their hair, sure and firm. Bodies needing warmth, stability. He’s never thought of Davey’s body needing anything but pain, (which is just a different breed of comfort) but there’s something instinctual moving Hunter’s hand to cup the naked bristle of his scalp, to hold it close. He moves on autopilot, in slow motion, and Davey allows him this. It feels like Hunter is watching them sit together from far away and trying to catalogue their interaction, put it in a descriptive box, and cannot. 

“Do you think you’ll ever get over it?” He asks, knowing the answer and thinking, strangely and invasively, of Zooey. Grass Valley. Other things he loved but shed easily, moved on from like a snake shucking old scales. 

Davey scoffs. “I know I won’t. It’s not like that.” They’re quiet for a moment, and Hunter stares at the flyers on Davey’s fridge again, counting them, noticing that many are expired. Then, Davey clears his throat. “Sometimes knowing I never will is terrifying. It’s just this overwhelming thing to endure, like I can’t possibly imagine how I’ll survive the rest of my life carrying around this weight. But then, other times, it’s the opposite. It’s comforting to know I’ll always have it. At least something will remain constant.” 

Hunter’s hand drops to Davey’s side, where it stays for a few strange, loaded seconds before it falls away. He tries hard to think if there is anything constant in his life, anything he can plot his map home to, as stable and ancient as stars. He thinks of the white flash of light before he comes, and then the ensuing emptiness. “I get it,” he tells Davey, and feels desolate.


	9. such a beautiful sound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter makes me cringe because like a month after I wrote it I ran into both AJ and Anthony (separately) and I felt creepy/like a dick. Oops.

Davey is glad Burials came out in 2013. 2013 was a better year than its two predecessors. Pop music was uncannily good in 2013, with all its young singing about the end of the world, dancing until the sun rose, throwing their hands in the air in surrender. Pop music felt different in 2013, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe Davey is just different now, and the young have always been singing about the end of the world, and he needed to grow old in order to notice. 

He’s moving between Johnny Cupcakes and McQueen’s on Melrose Ave, arm in arm with Melody Skeet, his third favorite girlfriend to shop with. Her raybands are blinding him with his own reflection in the high-noon sun, and he keeps thinking her mascara is tear streaked beneath them because he isn’t used to her new facial tattoo. _Levi_ in typewriter print at the tail of her left eye, _corpus_ at the tail of her right. The letters scrunch together when she smiles, and Davey doesn’t know what it means beyond the literal translation, and he won’t ask her because he loathes that question when it’s directed at him. 

She squeezes his hand, and their fingers slide together with sweat. It’s the type of sweat that comes with early December in LA, unexpected because it seems cold when your blood is so very thin. “You want to stop at Kidrobot?” She asks, snapping licorice gum between her lips painted cherry red. 

Davey shakes his head. He grew out of his Kidrobot phase a good seven years ago. He still has the hoodies in the closet of his Oakland home where they gather dust with his slip on Vans collection, his fake fur jackets he keeps telling himself he’ll give AJ, the turn table he used to fear he’d perish without before he caved into digitally backing up his records. The many ghosts haunting the smooth, echoey walls of the house that still smells like Jade when he returns, when he unlocks the door to a gust of stale misery, bowling him over to ash on the stoop. This is why he doesn’t return, if he can help it. “I don’t do casual anymore, unless it’s black, slate, or creme with a solitary color accent. Usually a cool color,” he tells Melody. This is what their friendship is like. They hold hands and talk about what’s in this season. 

She snorts, digs dagger nails into his forearm. “You are so full of shit. You say you have these things you do and don’t do, but you make them up on the spot.” 

Davey laughs because she’s right. Shaking his head, he rubs the bridge of his nose, feeling the dampness perspiration under his Chanel sunglasses. “I know” he says. “But some people believe me. In the moment, I even believe myself.” 

“You better. _I don’t do casual_. What utter bullshit,” she laughs, the diamond in her right incisor nearly making Davey’s eyes water as it catches the sun. She is so reflective today, painfully so. Showing him versions of himself he wanted to run from and drown in retail therapy. 

He squints, vision bleary like he were crying. “I don’t do Kidrobot anymore. That’s the truth.” 

“Okay sweetheart,” she says, tonguing the diamond, eyes unreadable but most likely semi-sarcastic behind her sunglasses. “Okay.” 

They leave their drinks outside Mcqueen’s in a shaded palm tree planter on the curb, Melody’s Urth Juice, Davey’s vegan peanut butter milkshake, melted to a gritty soup of ice and sugar at the bottom of the cup. He hopes no one throws them away; he really wants that soup when he comes out. His arm aches with the heavy Marc Jacobs bag he’s carrying, a silver zipped protective bag with the logo emblazoned on it. Davey knows most people who buy things as expensive as Marc Jacobs have them shipped to their homes to prevent any damage in transit, but he wasn’t born rich. He craves the weight in the bag, he craves the sensation of carrying his purchase around with him for the duration of the day, he craves the pain. The pain he must suffer in reparation for being rich now. It’s a game he plays, and the pain is an integral part of it. 

He gets greeted by name at the door and Melody gets called Rosie, which hurts them both because lots of people out here mistake Rosie as his girlfriend, which means they are currently mistaking Melody as such. Davey’s tired of the way everyone in Los Angeles can’t read, the way the pollution distorts his image through coke bottle glass, a thick kaleidoscope turning of every model he’s ever befriended or fucked into his girlfriend through the drug-haze gaze of the city, when the real heart of hearts sits safe and protected in his West Hollywood cage.

Melody cringes, rubs her hand through her bottle black ends. “Please tell me I’m not as pretty as her.” 

“God, no. No. Positively dreadful in comparison. A hag,” Davey grins, holding up Melody’s hand and kissing her tattooed knuckles. 

He skims the newest rack, drawn not to the black and slate and creme, but a vivid sky blue. Of course. Armin is singing _oh, how I miss such a beautiful sound_ on the overhead speakers and as Davey peruses suit pieces, he comes to a slow, shamed realization that this song moves him. He senses Melody somewhere behind him, the rustle of fabric and clink wooden hangers slatting together on the rack, and he’s glad she’s not over his shoulder, witnessing him get choked up over a fucking Armin Van Buuren song. 

He wonders when he became the type of person who is moved by Armin Van Buuren. If he now watches the end of the world approaching with an exhausted resignation, envying those who can raise their hands and dance all night, as he used to raise his hands and prepare to fight. He thinks of his faux fur jackets, the stains at the thinning fluff on the sleeves, and AJ’s bony wrists emerging from those stains. Raised hands, to dance, to fight, to surrender. AJ is much, much younger than him. 

And as always, Jade sidles through the shadows, the shape of his ghost formless, dark and vacant in the way it has become over the years. Empty space, the smell of his home in Oakland, the feeling in Davey’s chest at the lost wail of _nothing to hold but the memories and frames_.The feeling that he has lost something concretely and forever even though the nature of his years old turmoil with Jade is that it exists, concretely and forever. 

Suddenly very tired, Davey stops for a moment, wavers like a flame in a gust. He feels Melody’s hand on his shoulder, her thumb in the divot at the base of his skull, and exhales. “Ground control to Major Tom,” she says gently. 

He leans back against her. He fees too large against her whip-like body. “Just had a moment,” he confesses. “Felt like nothing was real.” 

Thin arms encircle his waist from behind. “You’re still recovering from tour-land. It’s a different realm than the one we exist in now. Give yourself a break, oh weary traveller,” she says, smiling into his neck. He reaches back, pets her head. Melody doesn’t know about Jade. Not explicitly anyway; he’s never _told_ her. She knows about Britney, about Nils, about Rosie. Davey’s friends come lovers come only friends again which have existed in her social circle, people she has seen him kiss up against the loveseat at his hairdresser’s, people she has sat poolside with and sipped cocktails with. She also knows his wounds run deeper than these people, but she’s never pressed the matter further, never asked him who it was and what they did to him. It’s part of why he’s here with her now, instead of with an endless list of other friends carrying varying amounts of his truth around their necks in vials. 

“Look, wanna go back to my place? Throw on Donnie Darko and have a Jake marathon? Zodiac’s on netflix, too. We could go balls out. All Jake, all day,” she suggests. 

Davey already has a headache; a screen will make it worse. He tries to scour his mind for what he needs, if it’s sex or love or Jade or to privately mourn the absence of all those things. He thought he needed to spend money with someone who didn’t love him, to be a mindless consumer and revel in that abhorred identity, to hide his tattoos and eyes and let people think Melody was Rosie and that Rosie was his girlfriend. Instead, here he stands, feeling marooned amid his own warring selves. 

“As much as it pains me to admit this, I think I just might need to sleep. Rest,” he says carefully, peeling himself away from her. 

“Ahhh,The dreaded S and R words. How we loathe thee,” Melody sighs, squeezing Davey’s wrist and its homage to Moz. Again, AJ thrashes across his mind, tall and lithe with the floppy blonde November Spawned a Monster hair. The eyes as bright and Nils’s used to be, even as bright as Anthony’s used to be. Before he made both pairs heavy and lined and white with cataract. “How about you drive yourself home, and crawl into your bed and stay there for a few hours? Call me if you can’t make it work and need company. I’ll still be out here, you can meet me. Or, I can meet you, and bring Jake with me,” she proposes.

For a moment Davey loves her because it’s so easy, she’s so easy, their friendship is so easy because she needs nothing of him. She doesn’t love him, or worship him, or want to be him. She has a girlfriend she’s been with for as long as he’s known her, they have matching Hole tattoos and they invited him to their housewarming party last fall he didn’t go to because it was last fall and he wasn’t capable of doing anything a year ago save for writing. He wanted her today for the simplicity she offered, but he’s hopelessly predictable. He wants simplicity in theory, but the self-destructive monster in him is compelled to return to the messes he’s made all over the city, his beautiful garbage. 

On his way home, he texts and drives, not caring who he kills as long as the crash takes him, too. _are you doing anything tonight? tell me there’s a show. or a party. or somewhere to dance. you can be my arm candy and I can be your daddy. we’ll make everyone else wish they were so lucky_ he punches out, hits send. 

_lol, if ur the daddy dont u decide where we go? :P_ is what AJ texts back, lightening quick. Davey laughs helplessly, coughs it out like poison because AJ is not Anthony, no matter how many times their faces become laminated upon each other in his mind before he comes. Anthony’s texts were painstaking, slaved away over, grammatically correct, clever, poetic, beautiful. Anthony loved him before he knew him, Anthony was so young when they met that Davey could have done anything to him, or he could have done nothing, and Anthony still would have loved him.

But AJ exists without Davey, has an image and a life and an identity that grew around his own bones, independent from Davey’s shape. It’s a dangerous thing, because Davey doesn’t have complete faith in his devotion. It’s dangerous, but it’s also more simple. He’s not as conscious of using AJ as he was of Anthony, Anthony who looks at him with a dark wariness in his eyes now, Anthony who will kiss him but with a closed mouth and a careful, self-protective hand on his cheek while he says _Dave_ , through his teeth, _Dave_ with a sorry smile twisting his lips like a grimace. _I have a girlfriend now, remember?_ Like Davey is the one crossing lines, like Davey is the one who is too much, wants too much, needs to be reined in. 

It leaves a sick feeling in Davey’s gut so he stops thinking about Anthony, seven hours away in his apartment in Berkeley he shares with his girlfriend. Anthony who seems taller every time he sees him, taller and darker and older and more afraid of him. 

_silly me_ , he types to AJ. _I will find something for us. wear your best. make sure it’s loose enough I can get my hands under it_

Davey and AJ haven’t fucked yet. Davey’s not even sure they ever will, not with the new way his own body freezes up under new hands like some piece of machinery with a broken part, not with the way things with Nils turned out, things with Anthony. Davey’s not sure he can ruin anymore boys and still retain his humanity, and he’s not sure he can fuck any of these boys without ruining them. There is no expectation of sex with AJ, only flirtation, and Davey can do flirtation. He can do it on autopilot like breathing. _lol u kno it_ AJ says in response. 

Davey swerves out of oncoming traffic, only just realizing he had drifted into the wrong lane. The sudden, sparkling rush of anxiety feels like home, and he shuffles his hands along the steering wheel newly slick with sweat. These are hands he’s slid into the holes on the sides of AJ’s Void shirt, all the way down his ribs, playing piano keys, a symphony, but never more than that. It’s easy. Easy to sidle around backstage saying things like _You know, they say Void is the new Black Flag of hardcore merchandise_ , into the inside of AJ’s bicep where there’s a triangle of ink, but mostly just miles and miles of unmarked skin. _I had a Void shirt before it was popular_ AJ would joke, with a lisp, lips close to Davey’s brow and twisting with the lust-drunk kind of smile only sXe kids get before he stumbles backward on red high tops, laughing like Davey is the damnedest thing. Like he’s not sure Davey’s for real. 

_The present has no ribbon_ the radio tells him, just below the acceleration of the engine. He needs to find somewhere to go tonight, some venue to witness him playing symphonies on untattooed ivories, pushing his own old, faux fur from bare shoulders. _Your gift keeps on giving._ He needs the bass to drop, the sting of hairspray in his eyes, his shoes sliding across beer-slicked cement. _What is this I’m feeling?_ He needs to be surrounded by youth holding their hands up, surrendering to the last month of 2013. He needs to be lost in it, assumed by it, erased by it. _If you wanna leave, I’m with it_. He needs them to look at him like he’s the damnedest thing. Like they’re not sure he’s for real.


	10. what keeps the planet spinning

Hunter thinks he might see Davey at this thing before he actually does. The friends are the right friends, the music is the right music, and plus the flyer had a painting of a naked woman tangled in a passionate embrace with a lion and Davey’s into that kind of shit. Still, Hunter’s heart sinks into his gut when he sees him, in a creme colored suit over a robin’s egg blue dress shirt, silver wingtips and AJ English slouching beside him. Hunter almost laughs at how ridiculous the whole scene is, and knows what he would think of this pair if he didn’t know them both. 

Dressed absurdly, expensively, two clashing brands of hipster Euro-chic in the middle of a hole in the wall Anaheim venue with tour shirts stapled to the wall lit by neon beer signs. It’s fucking Chain Reaction and Davey Havok has a date and a designer suit jacket. Davey Havok is showing skin down to his clavicles. 

AJ is, in his defense, young enough to look like he belongs here save for the company. He’s wearing thick red glasses frames with the lenses popped out, a threadbare Suicidal Tendencies shirt with at least one hundred different holes in it, hair bleached and strategically mussed into some Flock of Seagulls type mess on his head. He towers over Davey, unintentionally drawing attention to the fact that he’s a model, and Davey isn’t. Davey always looks so small next to his model friends, his model fucks, his plastic mannequins in their big, boxy heels and breakable ankles. 

Hunter snorts, weaves through the crowd (all in jeans, track shorts, hoodies, band shirts; there’s one girl with synthetic curls and a vinyl corset but Hunter overheard her saying she came from Das Bunker anyway) towards Davey. He gets to AJ first and lays a hand on his bicep ,where there’s a tattoo of a girl shielding her face. He doesn’t know what it means. He falsely assumes that all fashionable kids have meaningless tattoos. “Hey stranger,” he says, grinning, and AJ is grinning back, and there are teeth and smiles everywhere.Chain Reaction is full of teeth. Davey spins around, absurd in his designer wingtips. Eyes wide and surprised, he bluffs brilliantly, leaning in and enfolding Hunter in a friendly grasp. Their skin would ignite if it were somewhere different, somewhere private, but it’s Chain Reaction and there are teeth everywhere. 

“Everyone is here! It’s like a tour reunion,” Davey says stupidly, then, “Did you hear? They were playing Stone Roses a minute ago, I thought of you, it felt like 2001 for a minute and thinking they’d never tour again, I’d never get to see them. Made me think of you, our half-assed plans to go to Manchester last year. Two years ago, fuck. 2013 is almost over, I can’t believe it,” he says so fast it’s like something spilling, light into blackness, ink into margins. He’s speeding, drifting into Hunter’s lane like like wayward car, so high and fucked up on whatever it is that fucks Davey up that Hunter has to take a step back. Reclaim his own space, suck in a deep breath.

“That was you and Jade who were going to hitch a train to Manchester,” he says before he realizes the implications, already regretting his flurry of words. AJ looks stuck between things, confused, giving Davey this look like he thinks he’s hilarious and he’s not sure if it’s intentional or not. Hunter thinks of the woman fucking the lion. Her pale, painted skin crushed under the wrath of gold and muscle, and squeezes Davey’s shoulder. Unsure if he’s the girl or the animal.

“It was, wasn’t it,” Davey says, voice washed away by the surf of sound and sweat all boxed in this hole in the wall. He shakes his head, slides a palm up the back of AJ’s neck, eyes too black for feeling. “It usually is. I’m terribly transparent.” He makes a fist in AJ’s hair, and AJ smiles nervously, like he doesn’t know what Davey’s talking about. He probably doesn’t. Hunter’s concerned with the way Davey’s talking, this reckless, I-don’t-give-a-fuck thing. He knows Davey’s always spoken like this, he’s just never been close enough to notice the difference. To care. He hopes he doesn’t care, and turns away for a moment, towards the surging sea of people. 

“I gotta grab someone, hold on you guys,” he lies, and escapes into the movement, skin crawling from where it has touched Davey’s not today, not this week, but recently enough he still feels unclean. 

The night continues and he catches sight of them, swaying, touching, laughing. Teeth and smiles everywhere, until the floor of Chain reaction is a graveyard of teeth, a eulogy for smiles. Davey’s eyes catch his across the room multiple times, empty and hollow, forever flashing grin incapable of reaching them. It makes Hunter more irritated then it makes him sad, a thorn in his side, a fly in his living room. Twenty four hours left to live, and Davey is right, they’re spinning Stone Roses between the bands. Sick with someone else’s memories. His friends notice he and Davey keep watching each other, gesturing to each other. “Do you guys have band stuff going on? Drama?” they ask. 

Hunter doesn’t even know what that means so he answers “No. Just friend stuff. He’s going though a rough time,” and they nod knowingly and smile more dead smiles to join those asphyxiating on the concrete floor. Nodding knowingly like they’ve heard the record, like they’ve sang the eulogy. 

Eyes across the room, a glimpse behind broad, sloped, model’s shoulders and a vibrant tuft of bleached hair. _Are you okay?_ he mouths to Davey chin raised like an arrow pointing the way to him. 

_I don’t know_ he mouths back, brow knit. Or at least it looks like _I don’t know_ , though Hunter suspects it could just as easily have been the solitary, mournful shape: _Jade._


	11. such sweet nothing

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is one of the longest, densest, and most unhappy chapters in the whole of this thing. For that I apologize. Also, everyone please check out Blake's The Perfect Gift. It's a gloriously wrought piece of writing, and because we live together and spend many a night-drive over the Richmond Bridge talking about javey, it shares many ideas with this.

Davey is never-ending and there is no reprieve. Days come one after the other like beads on a rosary string, a prayer between smooth fingers, a heart beat following a heart beat following another. He sleeps like a cat, an hour here, an hour there, and maybe when compiled it’s the full, recommended eight to ten but it’s never compiled. 

Things come and go. Christmas, with its always-the-same dime store decorations staining his local 24 hours fitness, red and green mylar streamers, cardboard cut outs reading “happy holidays.” They play two big radio station shows in different halves of California, and he recognizes the whole front row in LA like he always does, and feels swallowed by a hungry sea of strangers in Oakland, like he has been lately. It’s predictable. His past eats him alive, so he runs away, runs south, to the semblance of solace. 

The sets blend together and he doesn’t remember what he does between them, where he stays and where he goes, who kisses him when Christmas Eve turns into Christmas Day like a Savior was born just like that, so suddenly. 

December is fading quickly into January, and soon he will be losing 2013. He feels as if he’s a treadmill band forever rotating, a run on sentence, until he is suddenly and unexpectedly punctuated by the only thing which ever stops him in his tracks anymore. It’s just another day during which he must keep breathing, and then it becomes a day when Jade texts him _I keep thinking of you and I don’t know what to do._

This happens. There are days when Jade can’t stop thinking of Davey. Davey know because Jade told him once, confessed in shame and desperation on some six-am morning when grey light was flooding into Davey’s bedroom like cream into old coffee and they both looked and felt corpse-old with it. Davey knows these days come, but he also knows that they come in cycles. Between them stretch months where Jade doesn’t think of him at all. Days where Jade is free of the thing Davey is never free from, because Davey chose to forget the key which unlocks the ball the chain around his rubbed-raw ankle. 

Davey is stuck in one place while Jade circles in wide berth around him, orbiting until they cross paths and eclipse again, aligning because Jade can’t stop thinking about Davey as Davey never stops thinking of Jade. In the meantime, Davey waits for it, grows roots into the earth which spell Jade’s name in knotted, dirty whorls beneath him. 

_Come visit_ Davey says, even though they know how this will go. It doesn’t matter. He has stopped trying to convince himself he doesn’t wait for these days, arms outstretched for someone who only loves him cyclically. He looks around his apartment for a moment, at the sterile, bleached interior of it. 

It’s like a ring of snow around the nucleus of his room, where he has been sleeping and shedding his clothes and brushing his teeth and changing skins frantically until something feels right. There are puddles of Marc Jacobs and Rick Owens in that room, condoms he’s jacked off into on the floor putrefying. There are shoes he’s toed off clumsily at four am, his shoes and AJ’s shoes. There are jackets he needs to get dry cleaned because they smell like smoke and sweat in the underarms. There are Hunter’s socks in a neat ball, Hunter’s solid black teeshirt he forgot the other evening folded crisply, Hunter’s sunglasses atop them in a quarantined corner he won’t touch until Hunter comes for those things he left, delivers them from evil. 

His room is a mess, chaos save for the corner of Hunter’s belongings, making the shame alive inside him grow bones and legs. He thinks briefly, _we won’t go in there_ but he knows it’s where they’ll end up. 

He floats numb and stupid into the living room, fumbles with his entertainment center, and plugs his ipod into the ihome in order to kill the silence. Something to fill the time it will take for Jade, who can’t stop thinking about him, to get to his apartment. The text has already come, the one that says _are you sure?_ and he has already sent the other text, the one that says _yes_. He always says yes these days. He didn’t used to, he used to resist and reject Jade when he wanted him, anything to exert control, but that was when control mattered because he was under the impression Jade would always be _there_. There to control, there to resist. 

Now he’s not so sure. Each time they fuck Jade’s orbit widens, and each time he moves further away. Eventually he will break free from the orbit, leaving Davey to burn up in the atmosphere and there will be nothing left. It will be over and forgotten, the wound lanced and drained and left to scab over. 

Davey used to know with certainty he would die young, but he’s not young anymore so he lives in his rotting body, unsure of when he will die now because he missed his train. He never used to imagine the things he would say and think when he was old, because being old was never something he foresaw. 

But now he wonders if that lanced and drained wound will be something he and Jade talk about once it’s over. If it will be something Jade thinks they both remember with fond sadness, a mistake of their youth, a glitch in their otherwise professional friendship. _Remember when we used to be kids?_ he’d say gently with a crooked smile on his ancient face, a wrinkled hand tight on some future mug in some future coffee shop. 

_Remember? We used to think we’d be together forever. Some crazy kids we were._ And Davey’s never-imagined grey hair and brittle bones would drag along the ball and chain still, while his papery lips mimic Jade’s lying smile and he answers with a hollow laugh and the word _yes. Yes, I remember. We were pretty stupid. Idealistic._ And maybe, maybe, if he is old enough and the scab he thinks will never come forms by some miraculous tragedy: _I loved you so much then._

And they’ll both laugh, Davey a pile of ashes, Jade just an old man, a different planet, a separate orbit. One lying, the other perhaps not. Davey believes this for a moment, resigns himself to this loathed life of cataracts and skin untouched by Jade. Then he shakes his head, cards his hands through his hair before holding them out in front of himself and studying them. Making sure they are still smooth, still narrow-knuckled and arthritis free. 

He doesn’t believe in this future for more than a moment. He can’t, because Jade texted him today. He can’t stop thinking about him today. He may be orbiting wider, but he is still in orbit. He might forever be. And there will always, always be music. Music is the unshakable knowing that holds them together like carbon bonds in water molecules. Fluid, moving, shifting, unreliable. But skin-breaking when hit at a distance. Blood-drawing, body-ripping when struck from a suicide-jump. He takes a deep breath, and forces himself to remember this. 

_Is it okay if I come now?_ Jade texts, and Davey nods although there is no one to witness him moving. 

_Yes_ he says because now he always says yes. _And with a word all my love came rushing out_ he thinks, sitting on his disinfectant-clean couch, folding his pale hands in their sleeves, pastels as sweet and pale as watergate salad. He awaits the imminent knock on the door. _Emptied out by a single word/ There is a hollow in me now._

Jade lets himself in amid familiar sounds, and Davey gets up to meet him. It’s a scene that’s been replayed thousands of times in the same place: Jade stiff and awkward in the doorway, Davey hanging back in his hallway, backlit and waiting for the shift in the air which tells him he can touch Jade, or that Jade is going to touch him. 

This time it’s Jade who approaches, in the same shifty, uncertain way he often does. Eyes doe-soft and coffee-brown beneath the crisp chestnut angle of his bangs. The bones of his wrists jut from under the hem of his wine-red sweater sleeves, and like he often does, Davey wants to save their naked pallor from the surrounding air. Press his lips to the mountain protecting the suicide vein which runs by it, a river of blood that’s no longer his to draw. 

They both waver like flames in a storm-gust for a moment, until Jade reaches out and completes the electrical circuit, hand to forearm. Davey flinches. Then they’re pressed together. Rubbing his face against Jade’s neck, Davey feels Jade’s voice vibrate through his lips. “How are you?” it says gently, something any friend says to another. 

Davey shrugs and answers rush through him like numbers on a slot machine. He lands on “Perpetual.” It rumbles against Jade’s throat, thunder on a distant shore, sounding worlds away.

“Perpetual,” Jade echoes. The word crawls through Davey’s hair. 

“Yeah. Like, moving quickly but getting nowhere. And unable to stop because of the getting nowhere part,” he explains, hands sliding beneath skin-warm cotton to palm over Jade’s heartbeat. “The past weeks feel like one long, lonely day.” 

“I know how that feels,” Jade mumbles, and Davey thinks without bitterness, _no you don’t._

They stumble to the bedroom, drawn there magnetically like Davey knew they would be, compelled by the mess inside to come make more messes, to feed the mess they already made, to cause the withered piles of clothes on the floor to multiply like the toadstools which crop up in unexpected clusters overnight on Jade’s otherwise perfect lawn. 

Jade’s chucks catch in the navy, faux-silk slacks at the edge of the bed, and Davey doesn’t even care there will be a footprint there for him to loathe later. His eyes are shut under the pressure of Jade’s lips, ribs expanding and contracting in great, desperate heaves, until suddenly Jade’s roving palms still atop his shoulders. 

“What?” Davey asks, eyes snapping open. He can sense when Jade is about to stop things because he’s thinking too much; he’s spent years steeling himself up against the pain of it. He digs his nails into the soft, fragile skin on Jade’s hips. “ _Jade._ ” 

There’s a furrow in his brow, a haze of confusion clouding his eyes which are fixed over Davey’s shoulder at the one clean corner of the room, the cell of sterile neatness amid all the chaos of Davey’s endless whirl of days. Ice sinks down into Davey’s gut, freezes him in ice expanding like ripples extending from a dropped stone. He claws deeper into Jade’s flesh. “What are you doing?” 

“Isn’t that Hunter’s stuff?” Jade asks, hands falling away from skin. 

He shakes his head. Jade’s either going to drop it because he does’t want to know, or the conversation is going to happen. He doesn’t have the energy to lie, he doesn’t have the will to. “Yeah,” he says. “He left it here.” 

The furrow deepens, and Davey can see in it that Jade knows what this means. He’s connecting dots, he’s smart and he knows Davey more intimately and purely than any other human being alive or dead, so he _knows_ what this means. He doesn’t believe it, but he knows. It does’t make sense to Jade why Davey and Hunter would be fucking, but he can see it in the careful fold of the shirt, the fingerprints on the raybans, the way Davey has clearly not touched theses items since banishing them to the corner of his room. 

“Why was Hunter here?” he asks, stepping back from Davey. The orbit widens, and Davey can already feel his insides beginning to smoke. There’s a sputtering disbelief already smoldering in Jade’s words, and part of Davey is shocked and sick and satisfied that he can still hurt Jade. 

He sighs, take a deep breath, and turns away from Jade to crawl into his bed because he doesn’t think he can stand for the duration of this inevitable fight. “I’m not doing this with you,” he tells the wall, listening to Jade’s impatient rustling behind him. “You can let it go and just come in here with me, or you can act all fucking high and mighty, you can try and punish me for it. It doesn’t change--”

“Fucking _christ_ Dave, let _what_ go?” Jade spits. “Did you...are you _fucking_ Hunter?” 

Davey doesn’t say anything because he’s not going to humor Jade, he’s not going to answer questions they both know the answer to. He rubs a hand over his face, and rolls over to meet Jade’s eyes. “Can we just skip this whole thing? Can’t you just get in this bed and let me--”

“Fuck. What. I can’t even fucking believe you.” Jade might be hyperventilating. Davey thinks this is a little dramatic, a lot hypocritical, and he’s exhausted already. _It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, why are you acting like it fucking matters?_ he thinks impatiently, drawing his knees to his chest and remembering how he sat through Jade’s entire wedding, how he stood up when she walked down the aisle like everyone else, how he listened to their vows and ate their cake and clapped when her sister caught the bouquet, how he _read goddamn poetry for them_ , how he objected with every fucking cell in his body but didn’t say _I object_ when he could have because he knew _it didn’t matter,_ even if he felt like his world was ending he put faith in the fragment of himself who still _knew_ it didn’t matter. 

“You’re absolutely ridiculous,” Davey says. 

“I’m ridiculous? You’re _fucking Hunter_ ,” Jade is pacing the room tearing frantic paths through the mountains of Mcqueen, tracking filth and debris and regret all through Davey’s labyrinth of shed skins. “Why the hell would you even...It’s _Hunter!_ Are you _trying_ to be cruel? Is this some weird, manipulative--”

Davey erupts, impatient with this whole thing, still broken, still hard. “Oh please. You’re _married_ , don’t even.” 

The room quakes, thunder on a distant shore. Davey knows he crossed a line and he waits for the storm. Jade stops, whirls, glares at him with the rage of someone whose one saving grace has been stolen, the rage of someone whose one remaining strand of purity has been held to open flame. Davey has spoken the unspeakable, and he waits for the storm. 

Jade holds up his index finger and says very slowly and deliberately albeit his shaking words, “Don’t you _fucking_ bring her into this.” 

“Then drop this thing with Hunter,” Davey slams back. Then “Just come here,” which sounds like begging. Davey doesn’t care. 

Jade shakes his head, gone already, lost already. “They are completely different, Dave. This is Hunter, we _work_ together,” he snaps, poison drenching his words they become blacked out and unreadable. “I’ve known him for years, Hunter’ in _the band_...are you so incredibly insecure than you need to...how did it even _happen?_ Do you stick your dick in anyone who’ll have you now?” 

“Why do you care? What are you trying to gain?” Davey breaks under the weight of exasperation, drawing himself up into a sitting position on the bed so he use his hands to show Jade _how little it matters_. “You act like something can _change this_. It doesn’t change, it _can’t_ change, you fucking _know that!”_

Jade’s eyes have adopted the reckless blackness they get when he’s hurt beyond reason. He’s going to say whatever he feels, he’s going to hurt Davey back until all the color has drained from both their gazes. They won’t talk for awhile after this, Davey can tell. He feels like he’s scrabbling at a disintegrating shore, crumbling earth beneath desperate nails, and he’ll do anything, say anything to make Jade accept that _none of this fucking matters,_ but his exhaustion mutes him. 

“You’re crazy” Jade says for the ten millionth time in his lifetime. “You’re sick and you need help. You’re not even human, Dave.” 

Davey has heard this so much it means nothing now. It’s just something Jade tells him when he’s made a fool, when he’s underestimated the amount of waste laid between them, the extent of the damage he dealt when he left Davey in the first place. His attacks on Davey’s humanity are always the result of his own endless contract of regrets. Davey knows this, but it taken aback each time. 

“You’re full of shit.” 

“No, _no_. You are. You think...you think that you can do whatever you want and fuck whoever you want because you labor under this _delusion_ that there’s some unbreakable bond between us. That you can do whatever you want to me and I’ll come back, that things are the way they were when we were kids, that we’re _in love.”_

Davey laughs cold and harsh. “I can’t even...You’re unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable. You, _you_ were the one who texted me today. You asked if you could come over, _you,_ it was you. And you’re acting like it’s just _me_ whose fucked up, like I’m fucking crazy, like I’m the one who can’t let go of you.” 

Jade’s face is red, eyes bunched into slits of wild fury. He’s not thinking. He’s wounded but aware he shouldn’t be because it’s unfair and dripping with hypocrisy so he’s lashing out. Davey knows, he’s seen it before on countless occasions, but his heart is still frantic, the threat of loss still stings where it hovers on some near horizon. So he shouldn’t fall apart when Jade says it, but he does anyway, because he is only human. 

“Do you _honestly_ think you’re still in love with me?” Jade spits. 

His abdominal muscles convulse involuntarily, tightening to defend his organs from a fist, unaware of the difference between figurative and literal blows. The wave of pain rises and washes over him, breaking against his own disbelief. _Jade_ he thinks, one lost, solitary syllable. It still seems unfathomable that Jade would ever question such a thing, even in his most wild, hurt-blind state. Love is something that Davey is allowed to question, but not Jade. Jade left. 

“Of course I am,” Davey says as evenly as he can manage. It’s true. They both know its true. It’s not a choice, it’s not an act. It’s an inconvertible state of being. 

“I don’t think you are,” Jade sputters. “I don’t think you know what love even is.” 

“Fuck you Jade, leave if you’re going to pull this shit,” Davey sighs, and his sighing it cut off by the surging river that is Jade’s hurt, Jade’s betrayal, all the feelings Jade is feeling but isn’t allowed to feel because he’s the one who left. 

“No. No. You think that love, that love is _dying together_. That love is becoming everything to each other, being miserable together for all eternity. I remember what you think love is Dave, I lived through that.” 

Davey throws his hands up, fed up in ways he can’t articulate. Jade’s denial and self loathing are forces he’s fought for too long to retaliate against anymore, there’s nothing to do now but submit to them. “You used to think that was what love was, too. It used to mean the same fucking thing to you, that’s _why_ we fell in love, don’t you dare pretend--” 

“Jesus fucking christ Dave, I was twenty something years old! It was _fifteen_ years ago, I don’t know what I thought, but whatever it was it was stupid and childish! I’m not there anymore, and you are. And you fucking _insist_ that I am, too” Jade tears the room apart, hands in his hair, dragging Davey’s bedside lamp off his table with a furious fist. Davey is certain no one else has ever driven Jade to such a point of desperate frustration that he breaks furniture, that he bloodies his knuckles against a wall in defeat. 

It used to make him feel like he was accomplishing something, it used to make him complacent. Now he just watches his lamp crash to the carpet with a resigned irritation, upset that he will most likely have to replace that bulb all because Jade is throwing a tantrum. And this is not even about fucking Hunter anymore. It’t not about anything; it’s about everything. 

Exhausted, Davey takes a deep, rattling breath and draws it into his panicked lungs, face in his sweating palms. “You think you love her? That your whole pristine-perfect wedding with her is love?” His voice is shaking, as it always does when he talks about her. He’s not supposed to talk about her, and it never ends in anything but violence, but he has to. He’s not the one with the delusion, it’s not him, and he needs that reality to touch the air. 

“Yes,” Jade says with the certainty of someone who believes a lie in a single moment. “Yes I do. That’s love. What she and I have, that’s love. That’s healthy. Two people with their separate lives and interests and existence who support each other without killing each other. That’s not codependency, or obsession, it’s real love. ” 

Davey’s insides collapse into splinters and blood, and somewhere amid the rubble there’s a response to this. There’s something that will draw Jade out of his prison of hurt. He could get out of his bed, he could push Jade against the wall and take him like he’s taken him many times before, fuck the denial out of him. But Davey doesn’t have the energy to keep fighting this, not right now, with someone who only loves him cyclically. _It doesn’t matter_ he thinks. _I’m tired of hope/with nothing to hold._

“I don’t have anything to say to you,” he mumbles with his fingers deep in his temples and tears he didn’t know were coming streaking in salty sickness down his cheeks.

“Good,” Jade says, storming out the door, but not before he upends the chair housing Hunter’s things into a rumpled pile of self-righteous misery. Davey stays in bed, finally feeling like he could sleep a full, uninterrupted right to ten hours. He nods off, thankful that Jade can still give him things he otherwise seeks in vain.


	12. skyscrape until we're taller

She’s the perfect size. Between 4’11 and 5’2, honey brown arms dusted with golden fuzz that glints fuchsia under the pulsing club-light. A little bustier than Hunter usually goes for, but they’re the tender, painful looking tits of a girl who could be younger than seventeen, like things swollen, newly grown. 

She’s here, though, so unless her ID’s fake or she blew a bouncer, she’s legal. Chocolate brown hair in a low, loose ponytail with purple tips fading lavender from shampoo. One of those slinky black shirts with sequins sewn in strips and no back. On the sweat-dewy nape of her neck there’s a tattoo of something in sanskrit. Hunter can’t read it because he can’t read sanskrit. He doubts she can, either. She has eyes like Vanessa Hudgens before she grew up. 

“I know you,” she says to him at the bar, stirring her drink with one of those miniature plastic swords. “You’re in a band. One of those eyeliner bands who switches between screaming and singing.” 

He laughs, the knot in his chest Davey has tied by existing loosening for a moment. 

Carefully, he takes a step closer, clears his throat, rotates his plastic cup of soda water where it sits on a bar napkin in front of him. “I’m actually barber. I’m not even sure what type of music you’re talking about, since I’m a polka-only type of barber. Nothing but polka.” He sips his soda with a raised eyebrow and a half smile, studying her face, trying to access wether there is something intelligent beneath the slick of daiquiri, or if her sentences are shaped like this when she’s sober, too. What he does find is that she looks like the cover of teen vouge with her shimmer of foundation, a smoothness which can only be an illusion, the work of retouchers or maybe maybelline. He uncrosses his arms and stands with his hips facing hers, invites his girl a little closer. 

“Shut up,” she snorts, grabbing his shoulder and leaning into him. “Get the fuck out. I know you guys. You played at Almost Acoustic Christmas this year. Maybe you don’t wear eyeliner anymore, sorry I even mentioned it.” 

“I, for one, never actually wore eyeliner,” he tells her. The space between them is dwindling already, the club is loud and she knows what she’s looking for, or at least what it looks like she’s looking for. If he wants to fuck her, he can. It will be easy. Easier than he usually likes it, but then again she looks and acts younger than he usually finds them so maybe it will pay off in the end. She smells like alcohol and hairspray, a smell that always turns him on, just by memory and association. 

“Oh, really?” she teases, running her index finger down his cheek. Her touch is charged. “That’s just your singer? The really, really hot one?” 

Hunter almost rolls his eyes, but catches the motion in mid sweep so it just looks like he was raising his eyebrows, looking at her in wide, mocking surprise. “Ohhhh I see how it is. So, he’s really, really hot? And I’m...”

“Just really hot,” she says, eyes half lidded and lips quirked up into a smirk before she twists away, escaping him for a moment to watch him watch her. She giggles. He wishes she had red vines right now, because she would be eating them seductively, stupidly, childishly. It would complete the picture, turn her seventeen right in front of him, transform her into the airbrushed version of herself he jacks off to. White teeth in perfect semi-circles beneath the curve of glossed lips, red waxy candy stretching and snapping between them. 

“No. Nope, you’re lying. You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” he feigns hurt. “I should just leave right now.” 

She rolls back to him, cracking up, high tinkling laughter he can hear well over the thudding, buzz-saw grind of the DJ because his ears are tuned into the frequency of young laughter. “Noooo!” she says. “Come back.” 

He grins down at her, aware of the inherent power dynamic which always overtakes his interactions with girls who know who he is. Hunter has flirted with more starfuckers than he can count. They’re the easiest type of girl to bring home, but when it comes to the quality of the actual sex, they’re the least satisfying. When a girl doesn’t know who he is, doesn’t know what he creates, she thinks they’re equal. She can perceive him as just another guy she met at a club, someone perhaps as lonely and lost as she is. 

Then the sex becomes infused with the dream that it could mean something. That it could go somewhere. That it could turn into love. It doesn’t matter if she consciously believes this or has it buried so deeply it seems authentic, sprung naturally from her bones rather than built of words and images in her brain. It always makes the sex better. Her false belief that they’re equals, that meaning rides between their slicked bodies and panting mouths makes Hunter come much harder than the sex for sex’s sake he has with starfuckers. 

_Civilians_ Davey calls them. People who don’t know them, don’t know their music. _They’re just civilians. They don’t know what goes on around them, they don’t know how to fight a war,_ he says. Davey never sleeps with civilians. He rarely sleeps with starfuckers, because Davey is a starfucker himself. All of his sexual conquests these days are models or designers or other boys in bands. They’re not people who know who he is out of admiration, they’re people who know who he is because they run in similar circles, they’ve rubbed shoulders at art galleries and fashion shows. 

_You think sex is better with Civilians?_ Davey asked him in disbelief one night, bare feet curled underneath him at he sat at the foot of a hotel bed in Manhattan. He was shirtless and Hunter was carefully examining the cut of his muscles, the way they dipped sharp and easy into the waistband of the sweats he was wearing because he had just come back from the 24 Hour Fitness down the street.

_Yeah_ Hunter had answered, bothered distantly by the word, but not enough to press the matter. _It’s because it feels more real. They put themselves into it because they’re seeing me as a real person, a real prospect rather than some guy in a band. We’re not rockstars, were not that type of band but it’s different when they know and don’t know. I can tell._

 _I wouldn’t know,_ Davey said with a smile equal parts sadness and superiority. _I don’t fuck civilians, because I don’t want to be real. I don’t want it to feel real, even. Reality is what I’m forgetting_. 

Hunter had nodded, realizing with a frigid clarity that he and Davey were very different, and he should remember that when he started to get too carried away. _Anyway, you know it’s not real, right? That it doesn’t matter who you are or who they think you are, no one really ever knows each other? That knowing someone, especially through sexual means, is impossible?_

Hunter does know. He knows that the sensation of authenticity in sex with civilians is an illusion. That it’s his wish for the wish for love which changes things, not the wish itself. He knows that it’s all in his head, and sex is sex is sex is sex it’s just skin on skin with sweat and adrenaline and all the meaning and symbolism he cloaks it in is his own misguided creation. _It doesn’t matter,_ he thinks. _None of it really matters._

“Come back,” she says again, this time with a whining lilt to her voice that makes her sound all of fifteen and Hunter’s stomach drops with a warm coil of arousal. 

“Okay,” he says to her, like it’s a huge decision. “But just know, I’ll be thinking about how you’re thinking about him this whole time.” A fly buzzes about the club, drawn to the lights hovering hazy and orange where they cut through the smoke machine’s plumes. Both pairs of their eyes watch it, until her gaze slides slyly to him. 

“Honestly I don’t even remember what he looks like. I just thought he was hot but I thought you all were hot. I was a little drunk, I’m not gonna lie,” she laughs the way people who drink laugh, with the assumption that everyone around them also drinks. Hunter laughs back; he’s perfected how to fake the in-group laugh. It’s gotten him all sorts of places he doesn’t belong. 

“He’s very short. Like your height. And very angry looking.” 

“Oh yeah?” she says, sipping her drink. “So not a nice guy? Not like you?” 

“I must admit, he does not possess my boyish charm,” Hunter pretends to buff his nails on his coat. “Or my bulging, athletic physique,” he adds, putting an arm round her shoulder and flexing it in front of them. His veins flicker beneath his tattoos, an old trick he’s played on countless women: making them fall in love with his feigned humility. Being the funny guy is a much less honest thing to do than being the handsome one, he thinks. Humor is always lies, beauty rarely is, though humor is especially disingenuous when coupled with beauty. 

She cracks up, encircles his narrow forearm with her fingers and says, “Oooh, so big! You could kill a girl with that.” 

“I could kill a bear with that. Strangle the life out of a jungle cat. I’m Tarzan” 

“Very impressive,” she says in that voice that girls use when they think Hunter is funny, and are feeling good about themselves for being attracted to a funny guy, rather than the handsome one, as if they miss the fact that he is also handsome in favor for falling for his self-effacing jokes. “But I thought you were a barber.” She smiles, thinking she is safe, protected. As if humor shields her from the ill intentions of beautiful people. 

“I’m actually a musician,” he tells her, pulling a pick out of his pocket and sliding it into her smooth palm. “Playing bass behind a very short and very angry looking singer in eyeliner.” 

“I knew it,” she says, and kisses him without setting her drink down, one hand tiny and bird-like as it claws into his shoulder. He kisses her back without humor, pulling her deep into the swamp of ill intentioned beautiful people.


	13. by my heavenly side

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This might be the most brutal chapter in this whole brutal thing. Sorry everyone. There's the Tori Amos song about how you can try and hold onto the gold of memories but in the end all you ever end up with is gold dust. It didn't occur to me until today but I think this story and especially this chapter may have been subconsciously influenced by it.

There is a small anchor stamped into bottom of Davey’s favorite set of drinking glasses. He likes to drink his water and watch the anchor slowly emerge, until he swallows and it drowns again. This is what he’s doing this evening, drinking glasses of water and watching the anchor emerge, drown, then remerge, until something changes and he feels like he can get up again. He drifted off after Jade left, in daylight, and awoke well after nightfall. This always makes him heavy and slow-moving with disgust and self-loathing, and water is as far as his capabilities stretch right now, so he lies tangled in sheets, grey suit slacks, and a black gym shirt. 

His phone screen glows in the darkness and he manages to squirm his torso far enough out of bed he can reach it, but still remain mired in sick-warm sheets. Blearily, he sees he has three missed calls five texts. All the calls are from Jade. One text is from Hunter, four from Jade. To better prepare himself for whatever cowardly blows Jade has decided to deal, he reads Hunter’s first with stinging eyes. 

_short notice but I’m at el cid. met this girl, shes like 18. gonna take her home if you wanna come. she thinks you’re hot, kinda knows us from the kroq show. don’t come straight here though, it’s a private event thing an it’ll be weird. lemme know if you want in._

The wave of nausea hits Davey quick and hard so he leans away from his phone, collapsing back into bed. He’s not going to respond; Hunter knows he doesn’t fuck civilians anymore. Plus, Hunter’s apartment seems universes away, eighteen year old girls even further, even more impossible. He doesn’t know what or who he is in this moment, but its not the Davey Havok who finger fucks eighteen year old girls at his friend’s jacuzzi parties, it’s not the Davey Havok who even wants to. He’s some version of the kid with the Germs patch on the elbow of a grey Descendants hoodie Jade helped him stitch. He’s the idealistic twenty something who stayed up until dawn with his legs twined in Jades, he’s the naive boy who thought he would die with his lips against that jugular, he’s the fool who wrote three syllable words into each of his songs and never thought he would front an artistic revolution, but dreamed of it. 

The first text from Jade says _please answer the phone Dave. I am so sorry, I was way out of line. Please let me talk to you._

The next says _I understand why you might not want to talk to me right now. And there’s no excuse for how I was acting. I was being ridiculously unfair. Whatever you do and whoever you fuck is entirely up to you. Please, when you’re ready, could you let me know you’re okay?_

Then _Maybe this is stupid but I’m really worried. Please just text ‘fuck you’ or something_. 

Lastly, sent forty three minutes prior to Davey’s last glass of water, _Please dave, im going crazy_

Davey lays back, drags his cheek through the tunnels he made to die in, and makes a wordless noise between sobbing and laughter. The darkness closes around him like a fist, condensing all his pain to the vacancy between his lungs, the place he feels things most purely. Sometimes it strikes him, how _right_ he is. How much Jade still cares, how inevitable and endless their mutual destruction is. It hits him so hard he splits open and pours into irretrievable bits of blood and filth. Things no one can collect in their palms, things no one can assemble, not even Jade. 

_It’s not just me going crazy_ he prays, face sticky and hot as he swallows thick, salty mouthfuls of his own snot. _It’s not just me_. If it were seven years ago, four years ago, even two, he would let Jade worry. He revel in Jade’s suffering, grow wild and reckless and cruel with his own hurt, his own power over this person he loved and wounded yet still loved him back, in spite of himself. He would feel immense with the pleasure of knowing, at least for a moment, _it’s not just me._

But now he is only exhausted. He’s tired of trying to convince himself that he doesn’t need Jade as much as Jade needs him. That he has the upper hand, than he needs anything. He’s tired of choosing his words carefully, of disguising how desperate and pathetic and stuck he still is and will forever be, especially when it doesn’t pay off. Especially when Jade will continue to dig barbs into that weak spot, tell him _you’re not human. you’re crazy. you don’t know what love is_ because he is mad with the pain of being in love, still. 

He hammers out: _i’m sorry, was sleeping. the door is still open if you want me. I still want you. i always do, you know that. i’m incredibly bad at self preservation._

The reply comes fast, and the vibration of it sounds like relief. _I am too._

It doesn’t take long for Jade’s car to crunch up the driveway, a sound which makes Davey’s insides flutter with confused, unnamed sensation. The door is pushed open, the door is pushed closed. Jade’s footsteps are so quiet he could be a ghost haunting these hallways, and if he was, Davey is sure nothing would change. Loving Jade is like loving a ghost, and that’s the thought he is thinking when Jade finds him in bed, invisible in the dark. 

“I’m so sorry,” Jade says in a very small voice. It’s too dark to see his face, but Davey has heard the way he sounds when he’s tear-congested so very many times he knows his eyes are red-rimmed and swollen with regret. He braces himself in the doorway. 

“Did you mean everything you said?” Davey asks without moving. 

Jade’s silhouette shuffles, shakes its head. “I don’t know what I said. I’m stupid. I’m a fucking idiot.” 

Davey nods, inhales raggedly. He thinks about the arrogant, foolish certainty he used to have that Jade would always come back. That Jade would always love him, always fail in resisting him, always be tied to him with their shared anchor of black, unshakable artistic drive. And Jade came back today. Here he is, but there is no certainty anymore that he will the next time. The orbit widens and widens, and one day the magnetism will break and they’ll spin off into blackness, lost forever. And Jade will still love him, of course. That part doesn’t change, can’t. But that doesn’t mean he will forever remain within touching distance, that he will brace himself in Davey’s doorway with wet eyes and a confused voice and apologize. 

Davey is scared, and that is the heart of it. He does not know how to live without this, because this has replaced whatever former definition he had of life. He is a corpse without it, and only when Jade eclipses with him does the corpse reanimate. 

“Dave, you know I can’t stop this. Not anymore than you can. I--”

“No, I don’t. I don’t know that. I used to, but not anymore,” Davey rasps, throat contracting around every word so that speaking is a fight. His room feels claustrophobic, his straight-jacket sheets and broken lamp and Jade’s silhouette telling him things he can’t know with certainty anymore. He closes his eyes and then Jade is in bed with him, pushing him down onto his back, smoothing his hair away from his face with rough palms. 

“Fuck. Dave, I need this. I need you, I don’t know what love is if it isn’t this. I’m so, so sorry,” he says, words fraught with the desperation of someone who is telling the truth to someone who will never be able to hear it. “I have no right to try and convince you, but _fuck_. Dave. Dave,” he repeats, mouth soft and broken as he kisses up Davey’s jaw, along his hairline, up in the warm hollow between his adam’s apple the the thrum of his blood. Davey twists and pushes into him, fights hard to breathe. 

_I need this, I need this too. But I need it always and you don’t_ , he thinks, but he can’t say it because Jade is kissing all the oxygen out of him and he doesn’t remember how to resist that anymore. He hisses and keens into Jade’s mouth, shakes so hard under him that he can feel the vibration of his chattering teeth radiating throughout both their skeletons. Jade palms down his ribs, digs his fingertips so deeply into the rivets there will be bruises there tomorrow, and Davey wants them. Wants the bruises, wants the blood, wants the swollen lip and the black eye. He thinks about peeling his tattoos off his body often, stripping himself of every memory and every ounce of proof that Jade has ever touched him, but right now he wants it all _so badly_. To be mapped out in Jade’s touch, to be constructed by evidence of those hands on his body. 

Jade sits up to pull Davey’s shirt off and rake his nails down the daggers on his sides, and the first word which falls from Davey’s mouth is “please.” The whole of him shudders and rocks with the exertion of breathing; he quakes like a fault, and again, “please.”

“Please what,” Jade says to his clavicle, where his teeth are fixed. Then, lower, the ridge of abdominal below his naval. 

“Anything,” Davey pants. “Just make me. Make me come. Make me alive.” 

“You are,” Jade says, very close to Davey’s mouth, eyes soft and bright and explosive in the darkness. His breath smells too familiar, too perfect-painful like every loved and loathed memory Davey has permanently etched into his skin like the anchor on his drinking glass, and he sobs because it’s too much. “I have your heart, right here, and it’s beating,” Jade tells him with a hand open and burning on his chest. 

“Make me,” Davey begs as they both ignite, leaving a smear of melted gold dust along the lifeline of Jade’s palm.


	14. rage til dawn

She floats in the passenger side, bumping against the ceiling and window of Hunter’s car like solitary balloon, buoyant on her sea of drunkenness. By the time they make it back to his apartment, her eyes are glazed over and half lidded. She’s stopped making sense, and even though Hunter’s half-erection is pressing against the zipper of his jeans, he knows he’s lots it tonight. 

There will be no salty-sweet sweat on the insides crease of her knees for him to taste, no quiet hisses of breath after dawn, no morning-after for him to twirl her spilt ends between his fingers and reconsider her age in the ten am light. He guides her stumbling body to his couch, watches her collapse like a puppet with cut strings, and tucks her in under a brown fleece blanket. It’s an old blanket; he’s had it since they toured and slept in a van. He’s used it to pillow his head against the window of that van as they sped to some new city, endless miles of nothing and a future where girls in bars recognize him from playing massive radio shows ahead of him like the year before the year the world ends. 

Her hair a brown and mauve halo about her flushed face, she passes out hard, streaks of mascara on one plump, drool-slick cheek. Her fist slowly loosens its death grip on her smart phone, which eventually drops to his carpet. Her fingers twitch to slackness. Hunter sighs, picks up the reflective box in its bedazzled skullanimals case and scrolls through the contacts. He’s looking for something, though he is unsure of what. 

Eventually, he slides her phone into the back pocket of her black cigarette pants, flicks off the kitchen lights, and watches his laptop flicker to life as his hardon forgets it ever existed. If Hunter were the type of guy who watched porn, he might do that right now, try and salvage the blood in his dick and work himself to a weak orgasm just to prove he’s still alive even if the girls he brings home end up passed out on his couch. But he’s not that guy. Its useless if it’s not real. Instead, he opens his browser, and wonders if she’ll sneak out his front door in the morning, or if he will have to give her a ride somewhere. 

Like something back from the dead, Davey texts him just as his eyes are starting to get heavy. _It’s not a big deal. but you should know. Jade found out about our extracurriculars._

They shouldn’t make Hunter’s stomach drop, those few words preceded by the disclaimed _it’s not a big deal_ , but he feels immediately sick upon reading them. His oncoming exhaustion scared from his bones, he swivels around in his desk chair, tapping a pen against the edge of the table in a tattoo of his new heartbeat, and reads it over again. He doesn’t like that Davey refers to Hunter’s fingers in his ass on a semi-regular basis as _extracurricular,_ but there are many things about Davey’s words he doesn’t like so it’s not worth wasting feeling over. 

_Oh? did you tell him, or what? is he pissed?_ Hunter texts, knowing on some level that no matter how Jade reacted to this revelation, it couldn’t have been easy on Davey. If he didn’t care, Davey would hurt. If he got angry or possessive, Davey would hurt. There is not a thing Jade can do anymore which does not result in Davey’s pain. Hunter can tell because he touches that pain on a semi-regular basis, he touches it from the inside out. 

_it doesn’t matter. it’s resolved. just thought you should know_. Davey texts back. The assumption that Hunter is an afterthought, a footnote in the glorious, ill-fated love poem of Davey and Jade pisses Hunter off. He can tell this is the way Davey’s thinking about it, he can tell he’s being dismissed.

 _dude, tell me what he said. Jade may be yours or whatever but he’s my professional colleague and friend and this could be a mess if I don’t have all the info. I don’t want to ddeal with your bullshit tonight. He thinks about adding, I have a passed out barely legal VH look alike on my couch_ but thinks better of it. It might help his case if Davey is still under the impression he has somewhere to be tonight, some flesh to sink himself balls deep into, some wish for reality to nurture. 

_Sorry. I wasn’t trying to blow you off. just didn’t want to make it sound like a bigger deal than it was_.   
Comes as one text shortly followed by another. For a formerly wordy poet, Davey rarely sends texts longer than a handful of three word sentences. It it his long-running exercise in brevity which Hunter is still acclimating to. A long-running exercise in brevity which Hunter is certain exists as some subconscious rebellion against all the poetry Jade forced to pour from Davey’s throat a decade ago, the poetry which came fast and easy like a porn orgasm. Hunter usually pities, but currently detests, the manner in which even the way Davey texts reeks of Jade.

 _I didn’t tell him. he just deducted. I didn’t deny it because it’s pointless for me to lie to him anymore. he yelled at me, broke my lamp. then he admitted he was being fucking absurd and groveled. I gave in, as I do lately_. 

Hunter sits at his computer, eyes stinging in the glow, and feels numb. The girl on his couch is snoring thick, wet-sounding snores. _Okay. He broke your lamp?_ he texts back mechanically. He has three new emails, and every one of them is spam. He deletes them. 

_yes_. Davey texts back. 

The electronic silence between stretches for a few moments. Long enough for Hunter to hear and notice small sounds around him, the acceleration of engines on his street, the whir of his laptop fans, the sludgy inhalations of not-Vanessa from his living room. His phone vibrates again, and it’s Davey saying, _every time I turn on the radio its summertime sadness. it’s winter. the radio doesn’t want to admit things are changing._

 _me and the radio both_ Hunter responds, but he’s not sure what he means. It feels like summer, in some sick way. The long days of emptiness disguised as freedom after the tour, the unrelenting Los Angeles heat, the youth writhing around him with their hands in the air. Long legs in torn, pale yellow shorts, lips forming delicate Os around the big-sticks you can buy for a buck fifty at the pier. The things that never change, the forever red dress and the bare feet ankle deep in hot Santa Monica sand. Years are going by fast, slamming past Hunter like traffic. He holds on to the edge of his laptop table, yet still, they rush by. 

_I think ill miss him forever_ , Davey texts. 

Hunter rubs his forehead, hears shuffling footsteps he’s unsure are real until the wobbling silhouette of a girl appears in the doorway. “I need to pee?” she slurs, and he stands, guiding her to the bathroom like a father would his daughter, chaste hands on bony brown shoulders. He spends the rest of the night listening to her vomit hit the water in his toilet, and the same four songs repeating on the radio.


	15. i found the vein

Davey feels despicably whole with his head resting heavy upon Jade’s heartbeat. Their bodies are twined, still heaving although it’s been minutes since either of them came, and Davey keeps scouring Jade’s sternum with the stubble on his own jaw. Jade lets him, fingers twined loosely at the hair sweaty and unclean at the back of Davey’s neck. Davey hasn’t bothered to count his grays, but it makes him feel compelled that he knows Jade has touched them all. 

Davey used to rip himself away from this. He used to leave Jade in a mess of their combined insides, gutted and spiteful so he could wrench himself upright and skyward, desperately constructing a version of this story where he was the one who came out on top. Now he lays and counts the moments. Counts the heartbeats, sounds the breaths, and places every single one in a row beside his deepest self. Exists within them completely, agonizingly present. He has an arsenal of memories now, Jade stripped to the bone and in his arms, admitting that this will never end, admitting with red eyes and immortal confusion that he and Davey _are_ the same, will forever be. 

Instead of running from this to prove it will last until they die, Davey throws himself headlong into it and holds on with his teeth, because he’s no longer sure that it will. 

He blinks, rubs his chin into the already-pink spot between the dual dip of Jade’s clavicles. “I’m quite stuck to you,” he murmurs, and blinks watery eyes. 

Jade sighs deep, and Davey’s body rises and falls with it. “Yeah, We’re gonna get cemented like this permanently if we don’t do something about it soon,” he says. 

“Too late for that,” Davey tells him. His eyes close, his hand moves down Jade’s stomach, pauses to rest on the letters that don’t mean anything anymore. They are both covered in ink which does not mean anything anymore. That’s the problem with getting tattoos with meaning. Meaning is not in things, meaning is in time, and time charges past them. It’s almost new years eve, and the world is ending soon. 

“I could use a shower,” Jade says. 

“I have a shower,” Davey tells him. 

“I do too,” Jade responds, hand suddenly still. Davey grinds his skull into Jade’s palm to keep it moving on him, to postpone the ending of something he knows must end. He doesn’t want Jade to stop. He doesn’t want Jade to go. He doesn’t even want the world to end, but it is ending fast. Maybe if it ends before this does, it will preserve some fraction of what they were, but Davey is too jaded to imagine anything preserving something so long lost. 

“You should be in mine instead,” Davey offers, raising his head to meet Jade’s eyes for the first time since they came over one another’s fists fifteen minutes ago. He is talking about more than the shower. 

Jade stares at him in a very familiar way. It says _I am yours. But I also can’t be. I can’t be what you need, even if I showed up on your doorstep with all my belongings and divorce papers signed by my wife whom I love very much, even if I turned back time_. Davey stares back in a very familiar way. It says, _I know._

“Okay. I’ll try out your shower, Dave,” Jade eventually answers like it’s the first time he’s rinsed Davey’s come from his thighs in that room. Davey counts the breaths it takes him to say it. 

They walk on unsteady legs to the bathroom. Davey keeps having to use the walls to correct his balance; it’s hard to stand and his brain is static. He doesn’t remember the last time he ate, but he is very full of water and needs to piss. Jade watches him struggle down the hall over his shoulder. “Do you need me to carry you?” 

With out looking up from where his head is pressed to his forearm which is pressed to the wall beside his Aaron Nagel, Davey raises his free hand to flip Jade off. They make it to the bathroom, and Davey holds himself up using the medicine cabinet while he pisses. He will leave a sweaty, open hand print on his mirror. Another reminder for tomorrow, another thing he will see which will send needles down his gut. He doesn’t care. He is a history of repeating histories. 

Jade turns on the water while he watches Davey piss all over his own toilet seat. Davey wonders if it’s hard for Jade to see him clumsy and starving and falling apart, if it makes him worried, or sad, or resentful. If it makes him hard. Jade half answers question by saying, “I wonder what it would take for me to not find you attractive. What you’d have to do.” 

Officially empty, Davey clambers gracelessly down to his bathroom floor, and stretches out on his back. The world is spinning, the red glass light fixtures on his ceiling, the marble counter top, the smudge of old, tattooed skin which is Jade’s body. “I’m sure you’ve found me unbeautiful before. You’ve told me so. Plus I’ve seen it in your eyes.” 

The Jade smudge shakes his head, standing and wavering, naked and vulnerable and the same shade of dirty white as Davey’s shower curtain, which needs to have mildew scrubbed from it. “Unbeautiful, sure. But that’s different. Even when I hate you, I’m attracted to you. I’m attracted to you in my sleep. It’s this fucking magnetic thing.” 

“Even when I’m pissing on my own toilet seat,” Davey says, closing his eyes and wincing because it feels like he just came off the teacups, dizzy and weak under the hanging rainbow of lanterns and Alice’s voice in a loop. 

He can tell Jade is nodding, even though his eyes are shut. He can tell Jade is rubbing his face with his palms, he can tell Jade’s rubbing the oversensitive skin of his dick because he’s getting hard again, he watched Davey and his cut body and scarred skin lean in the general direction of his toilet and miss, and got hard because it’s this fucking magnetic thing. He can tell all of these things. He wonders if Jade gets hard watching his wife piss. He doesn’t think Jade watches his wife piss. “Is that water warm yet?” 

“No,” Jade answers. “Not hot the way you like it. Though that heat will make you pass out when you’re like this, Dave.” 

Davey shakes his head, which means rolling it back and forth on the cold tile. He opens his eyes, and they fall on a corner of his bathroom where the counter meets the molding. There’s dust, a floss threader, and a numerous tiny, shaved hairs there. It looks like loneliness, and in this moment he is not lonely, so he closes them again. “I’ll be fine.” 

“Kay. Come on. You were so eager to get me in your shower, now you’re the one on the floor.” 

Davey can’t get up. He lolls around, and his abdominals, which are sticky and crusted with Jade’s come, clench but nothing else happens. “I need help,” he murmurs, a sick soup of his bathroom still spinning behind his eyelids, crackling like old VHS footage. 

Jade walks over to him, stands with a foot on either side of his ribcage before he shifts painstakingly to his knees. The water pounds into his shower drain, steam billows and fills his bathroom, chokes them both. Davey can sense Jade’s body towering over him, he feels the shadow fall over his face. He opens his mouth, then opens his eyes. 

Jade is leaning over him, and he has a thick white string of saliva hanging from his lips. Davey blinks, and it falls into his own mouth. He closes his eyes again, and swallows.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> time to kill this thing.

The new year comes as unexpectedly as Thanksgiving. It’s an inescapably warm, windy morning of blue skies and palm frond clatter., which Hunter is tuning out, thumbing through LA weekly when he realizes that tomorrow is the first day of 2014. There are events everywhere dedicated to the year’s death, parties and art openings and concerts with unbelievable lineups. It’s a big menu to choose from, and Hunter is not overwhelmed by big menus. He selects from the menu the event which he thinks will have a biggest menu, the most diverse parade of young flesh to choose from. 

Surprisingly, he wishes that Davey would accompany him. Help him corner and woo girls, use his brilliant smile and tortured eyes to draw them in like planets in orbit. Ensure his year goes out with a deafening bang. But Davey has lost that smile, Hunter knows for sure now. When this began they were the same, but the closer and closer their bodies became, the further the divide in their understanding of sex stretched. 

Anyway, Davey has gone to the same New Years Eve party for the last three years at least, with his brother and his boy toys out in the OC. Jade and his wife go to the same party, but there are never any pictures to prove they don’t leave a room the second Davey enters. Hunter would prefer to be anywhere but this party on New Years Eve. 

Hunter rubs a over his skull. He and Davey haven’t fucked since Jade found out, even though Jade finding out was supposedly not a big deal. He doesn’t miss it, not exactly. His body feels different when Davey isn’t using it to destroy himself. Less poisoned, less ancient, less dirty. These are things he would never tell Davey, even though Davey probably suspects them. He knows the effect he has, because Hunter has the same effect on young girls and Hunter knows it. This is why they should stop what they’re doing, why they have. Because two forces capable of aging the population at an alarming rate, of stripping youth, of stealing it while their portraits age somewhere neither of them has found yet, should not converge. 

The world is ending fast, it doesn’t need to end faster. Hunter still has too many cherries to pop, too many young smiles to steal. He doesn’t want them to look older the next morning, but they alway do. He used to think it wasn’t his fault, that he wasn’t a monster. Now he’s not so sure. 

He doesn’t want to suffer the same fate as Davey and Jade. He doesn’t want to be stuck in orbit. He used to not know why he needed a new face every morning, but leeching off of Davey’s endless disease, catching it under his nails while he sought answers deep inside Davey’s body, has shown him it’s because he doesn’t fear dying alone as much as he fears dying in love. Now he knows what that looks like, and it’s not beautiful. It’s a fucking mess. He’s still trying to wipe that mess from his palms, from his dick, even though it was never his mess to touch and he only sullied himself by association. That’s how toxic it is. He doesn’t miss it. Not exactly, anyway. 

Hunter doesn’t text Davey, he just shows up where he plans to show up. A hour before midnight, the last hour of 2013, he has a girl tucked under each arm, and one has already left a ribbon of deep purple bite marks down his jugular. He feels dizzy, drunk off their breath, and thinks of the comb and the toothpaste in his glove compartment. He thinks of the shirt and the sunglasses he left at Davey’s place a week or so ago. He doesn’t miss them. Not exactly.

The girls might both be named Heather, he’s not sure. The name makes him think of Davey, so he renames them Jules and Julie in his head, because he just saw Derek Woods at the bar and he knows Derek Woods always takes pictures of a girl named Julie who is probably his girlfriend. _Take me to the other side_ the stereo sings for a final time, and then the synth twists and morphs into the opening chime of Summertime Sadness, even though the year is about to change and it’s months away from summer.

Jules and Julie are both dirty blonde and so similar they could be sisters. They kiss exactly the same, and neither of them know who he is. He closes his eyes, and lets them lick identical pathways up his neck. Maybe they think they love him. Maybe he loves them for thinking they love him. Maybe he loves the idea of them loving him. His dick is twitching it’s so hard, and for someone apparently terrified of dying in love, he sure thinks about love a lot. 

Heather and Heather are civilians. They use their civilian palms to rub his dick through his pants. Hunter closes his eyes, tilts his head back, and waits for the countdown. 

Meanwhile, 34 miles away Davey is wearing head to toe Marc Jacobs and spinning lights an inch in front of his brother’s face like the lanterns spinning above the teacups. Mikey is slack-jawed and grinning and bathed in highlighter yellow and pink, his breath smells like champagne and Davey doesn’t even mind because he loves everything about his little brother. He is the one person who is safe to love. 

Davey feels old because he only knows how to play with glowsticks. It’s a firm marker of his age, especially when surrounded by slimmer creatures with their neon bandeaus and wedge heels, tan naked chests beaded with sweat. They all have clever toys, orbitals and gloves and other things which make an otherwise difficult skill effortless. 

He sees Britney; they ignore each other. He lets his friends of friends think she is the reason his eyes don’t carry a shine anymore. It’s not as if she’s completely free of blame, everyone who has ever touched him holds some responsibility. Even Hunter, who is not here. His actual friends pat him on the back or steer him from the room when Jade and his wife arrive. Mikey grips his arm, crinkles the Marc Jacobs spring floral sleeve in his titan grip and says very seriously. “I’m gonna go cockblock him, Dave. I got you.” 

“Baby,” Davey coos, tilting his head and rising to the toes of his wing-tips to kiss his big-little brother on the mouth. “What did I ever do to deserve you.” It’s not a question. 

“I got you,” Mikey says, winking. He looks like he wants to ruffle his hair, but he knows how long Davey spent on it so instead he just goes, saves him from having to look into the light. Davey’s glow sticks are fading, he drops them on the coffee table and glides out the sliding glass to the chilly evening, where girls are holding red cups and 4th of July sparklers and singing Summertime Sadness, even though it is not summer and they are not sad. 

Eventually Davey finds himself stripped down to trunks and bobbing in the hot tub between many white, tattooed bodies, his skin of Marc Jacobs shed to a neat, folded pile in the guest room. At one point his tongue is in Nils’s mouth, but feels as dead and empty as he thought it would so he disentangles himself, stumbles dripping to the bathroom where there is a line Jade is waiting in, conveniently alone. It’s this fucking magnetic thing. 

They don’t look at each other. Davey is very aware of his shirtlessness, very aware every tattoo he has ever gotten is somehow indirectly or directly related to Jade, and is obviously, painfully visible to both of them in this moment. He hates his tattoos, but there is nothing to be done about it so he only crosses his arms. He doesn’t know what Jade is wearing or if he looks nice, because he’s staring at the chlorinated puddle he’s making on the carpet. 

The bathroom opens, and a big guy in track shorts and a Guinness hoodie busts out without acknowledging either of them. Other people mill around the hallway, drunk people, loud people. Davey wishes Mikey was here to intervene, enfold him into a broad chest, a cologne cloud, safety. Instead, Jade lets himself in the bathroom, tapping Davey’s naked shoulder as he passes. 

It’s this fucking magnetic thing. This orbit. Whatever it is, Davey follows, thinking, _take me home, where my dreams are made of gold_. It’s one of his favorite songs off of one of his favorite records of 2013. The door closes behind him, while outside young people are putting their hands in the air and singing about the end of the world. Davey’s eyes sting, and Jade’s lips sting on top of his own, breath chased from his chest. Davey closes his eyes, and waits for the countdown.


End file.
